GroupM Launches Finecast in Canada, Bringing Addressable TV to North America

After great success in the UK and Australia, Finecast brings its addressable TV offering to Canada, making it the first truly global platform with these capabilities

Toronto, ON (5 March, 2020): GroupM, the media investment group of WPP, today announced the Canadian launch of Finecast, a leading addressable TV company that enables advertisers to precision target audiences in connected TV environments. After successfully launching and running campaigns in the UK and Australia, this entrance into the Canadian market solidifies Finecast as the first, truly global platform with these capabilities.

As consumption habits continue to evolve with the diversification of devices, content, and channels, it has become increasingly complex for brands to plan and target audiences on TV. Finecast solves this challenge for Canadian clients, providing a single point of access into the whole TV ecosystem by managing distribution and frequency holistically across broadcasters and screens to delivering relevant audiences wherever they’re watching.

“As the largest media advertising company in the world, GroupM is able to create the scale of partnerships required to find relevant audiences in the fragmented TV landscape,” GroupM Canada CEO Stuart Garvie said. “With Finecast, we have partnered with the top content providers, broadcasters, platforms and data providers in Canada to build this market that will inevitably add more value to consumers and advertisers.”

The first-to-market Finecast model gives advertisers the ability to deliver targeted ads to audiences across multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms and set top boxes, a range of video on demand (VOD) services, over-the-top (OTT) providers, and game consoles – all combined for scale, inherently viewable, within high-quality, brand-safe content. At launch, this includes distribution across broadcast partners such as Bell, Rogers, CBC and Corus who all develop high quality premium content, as well as distribution across platforms such as Tubi, Amazon, Roku and Samsung with further partnerships to be announced later this year.

Data partnerships with Environics Analytics, Mastercard and a variety of third-party suppliers with in-depth Canadian consumer expertise facilitates intelligent segmentation by socioeconomics, life-stage and financial behaviours providing our clients with highly precise audience profiles on the big screen. This enables Finecast to show different ads to different households who are watching the same program, thereby reducing ad wastage, driving effective CPMs and minimizing costs.

“There’s never been a better time to watch TV, as investments in original content continue to exponentially increase,” Finecast Global Chief Executive Officer Jakob Nielsen said. “With the advancements in data and technology, the advanced TV advertising opportunities available for brands is truly exciting. We know linear TV viewership has been declining, but the audience is still there; they are just changing the way they consume content. Finecast gives GroupM’s clients a holistic view of, and access to, their audience, regardless of where they are watching.”