Edward Norton attends the red carpet during the 14th Rome Film Festival on October 18, 2019 in Rome, Italy. In 2014, the actor and his friend, the entrepreneur Daniel Nadler, founded EDO to compete for the last frontier of legacy media measurement. Now, investors are placing bets on startups that could win a slice of a $65 billion TV ad market.he actor Edward Norton has played a lot of characters. He’s been an insomniac underground fighter. A private detective with Tourette syndrome.
EDO, founded in 2014, is just one of a number of startups vying to compete with Nielsen, the longtime industry stalwart that experts say has had a near-monopoly hold on the TV ratings and measurement industry. Nielsen, founded a century ago, has faced a number of setbacks as advertisers and networks demand better ways to track audiences in the streaming era.
It might seem incongruous to have a prolific creative like Norton as the mind behind a company using machine learning, but he’s not doing it solo. He cofounded EDO with his friend, the poet and entrepreneur Daniel Nadler, who sold his AI startup Kensho Technologies to S&P in 2018 for $550 million, which at the time was the.
“When you go to Google as an advertiser or go to Facebook as an advertiser, you don’t say ‘I would like to reach 67% of males 18 to 49,’” he says. “And yet that’s the way TV’s been sold since the 1950s or so.” “It’s the classic experimental designs of psychology in the 1950s and 60s,” he says. “Which is where we have a participant subject and we’re going to give them stimuli A and a stimuli B and we’re going to see their reaction and measure their reaction.”here are other factors that also could play into EDO’s appeal. Showrunners want more data from streaming services about how content performs. Marketers say platforms like Hulu and Roku have failed to provide enough data on ad performance.
“It’s ridiculous that you’re proposing brain surgery on me and my business with a Stone Age axe in the era of the gamma knife,” Norton says, referencing the advanced radiation treatment used on cancer patients. “I want the gamma knife. I don’t want a Stone Age axe on my head, meaning my company, because this is too freaking important to me.”
“It’s a leading indicator of outcomes because it’s an immediate measure of an increase in consideration and intent because people not only saw your spot,” Piner says. “But also started to engage and search for it…People Google something when they’re interested in it.”
tprstly interesting