ShowSeeker Simplifies Access to Daily Viewership and First-Party Data in its Pilot Order Management System

The amount of data sloshing over the advertising business is enough to make anyone’s head spin. Media buyers and sellers both need to be able to organize, analyze and utilize information about audiences to help marketers reach the viewers most likely to buy their products.

“The business we’re in is the powerful simplification of data,” says Kevin Dang, Director of Research and Insights at ad-tech company ShowSeeker, offering a solution.

ShowSeeker is owned by Charter Communications’ Spectrum Reach ad sales unit.

“I think data today can be extremely complicated and fragmented,” Dang told The Measure. “We want it to be compelling, accessible and, most importantly, relatable.”

In addition to managing inventory, the advanced cloud technology behind ShowSeeker’s Pilot order management system allows it to ingest and organize a torrent of data from multiple sources. That’s important because Pilot is adding a lot of new data that its clients will be able to take advantage of—from daily info about campaign viewership to first-party data from its cable-operator partners.

In June, ShowSeeker made a deal to bring Comscore’s person-level local live and DVR viewing data into the Pilot system.

Using person-level data creates greater granularity and precision for planning and buying.

“Viewership at the person level is a lot more refined and robust because you're looking at individual viewership. You can target sports fans better, target dads better, target families with teens going back to school,” Dang said.

ShowSeeker has also been working with Comscore to be among the first to get Comscore’s Persons-level Pulse data, which is delivered daily. Starting in Q3, Pilotusers will be able to use Persons-level Pulse data to better track the progress of campaigns while they are in flight.

“Persons-level Pulse is a game-changer,” Dang said. “We can look at daily viewership of individual level consumption just days after air date. It's something that I know some of our major clients have been asking for, and we plan to be among the first ones there.”

In addition to the data from Comscore, Pilot users can access data from other research companies, including Nielsen, which has boosted its capabilities with advanced audiences.

“This is 2025. We plan to be an equal opportunity data partner, and part of that is just overhauling the way that we take in data, which in the future will be entirely cloud based. It'll allow us to process data faster,” Dang said.

For its next big innovation, ShowSeeker plans to bring first-party data about viewing from its cable operator partners into Pilot. “We will be ingesting, modeling and visualizing a client's first-party data set within Pilot,” he said. The company’s top priority is to ensure that “first-party data from our clients is handled securely and maintains the customer privacy policy of our respective partners,” he added.

Pilot also works with clients to facilitate advanced audience segmentation through third-party specialty data, including auto and lifestyle segments, as well as political activity, which are very useful during election years.

Dang said that at most cable operators, first-party data can be siloed and limited to specialized analytics teams. Pilot’s vision for first-party data is to democratize it, putting it in the hands of the entire client organization, including ad sales. “We were hosting focus groups with our client partners about this, and there's people that have never been exposed to first-party data within the organization,” he said.

First-party data, with billions of minute-by-minute viewership data points, will sit next to Comscore and Nielsen’s third-party estimates in Pilot, Dang said.

“The beauty of first-party data is that it unlocks advanced audiences with hyper-granularity, so you can see which viewers are likely to vote or are in the market for a Lexus, all next to the usual demographics,” he said. Media buyers are increasingly looking for first-party data, so “being able to facilitate that will create a new value proposition for MVPDs and advertisers, which is what we want to be doing.”

All of that viewer data, combined with ShowSeeker’s Predictive Programming feature, helps build effective campaigns. Traditionally, programming data is limited to a 56-day confirmed window, creating a challenge when planning campaigns a month or a year in advance. Using AI and machine learning, Predictive Programming allows users to forecast and schedule programming data 12 to 14 months in advance by analyzing historical data at a network and program level. That means more accurate schedules, better-informed ad placements, and fewer last-minute surprises.

“If you've ever used Pilot, one of the most beautiful things about it is the speed of it. Everything within planning, buying and posting happens nearly instantaneously,” Dang said. “If you make data immediate and accessible and relatable, end users gravitate towards that, and there's a lot more engagement with the data set. Our end clients are happy. Their end clients are happy.”