Jury Orders EDO to Pay $18.3 Million to iSpot for Breach of Contract

Ad data and analytics firm EDO was ordered by a jury to pay $18.3 million to rival measurement company iSpot for breach of contract.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, iSpot said that EDO, co-founded by actor Edward Norton, used iSpot’s proprietary data and systems to build a competing business.

EDO agreed to contracts making it an iSpot client in order to measure and predict movie box office performance, according to the suit. Those contracts barred EDO from using iSpot material to build at TV analytics service.

“Unbeknownst to iSpot—and in blatant breach of its promises and representations—EDO was developing its own competing products and TV monitoring and analytics service while an iSpot customer, and was using iSpot’s intellectual property, data, and designs to do so,” the iSpot lawsuit said.

As part of its effort, EDO took tens of thousands of digital ads, including their proprietary metadata structures and elements, and made millions of automated calls to iSpot’s APIs to scrape extensive metadata, ad airing schedules and other information collected by iSpot for ads in nearly every industry in iSpot’s database, according to the suit.

Shortly after their contractual arrangement ended, EDO in 2018 announced two new products called the TV Ad Database and the TV Ad Engagement Platform. iSpot alleged that those products were “built on the back of iSpot’s data and product” and designed to take customers and market share from iSpot.

To find that EDO violated its contract with iSpot, the jury had to unanimously agree that EDO passed through iSpot’s raw data directly to EDO’s customers, or that EDO used iSpot’s data to test EDO’s TV Ad Dataset, or that  EDO used the iSpot Service to build and/or contribute to EDO’s own competing third party products, namely EDO’s Ava Product, TV Ad Dataset, or that TV Ad Database (now Ad Engage), or that EDO used non-movie data it downloaded from iSpot using Disney’s API access key to help build or contribute to EDO’s TV Ad Dataset. 

In its lawsuit, iSpot also charged EDO with violation of the Defend Trade Secrets Act, misappropriation of trade secrets and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

EDO has become a major player in the business of measuring the outcomes of television advertising campaigns, working with companies including NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co., Paramount, Amazon and Toyota.

A spokesperson for EDO said the company plans to appeal the decision.