MiQ has launched its Unified Screens Planner in Australia and New Zealand, describing it as the only total screens planner in the two markets.
The tool combines linear television, streaming, OTT and YouTube data in a single planning system to help media buyers allocate budgets across channels and measure unduplicated reach.
Developed in-house, the planner is designed to replace the separate workflows often used for TV, BVOD, SVOD and YouTube campaigns. Users enter campaign budget, audience, market, channel choices, CPM, frequency, reach targets and existing commitments, and the system produces a unified reach curve and incremental reach analysis.
The launch comes as advertisers and agencies contend with a more fragmented viewing market, with audiences switching between devices and video services in ways that make cross-screen campaign planning harder to manage.
Data sources
The planner uses data from several partners, including OzTAM's VOZ measurement dataset, YouTube historical exposure data through Ads Data Hub, Samsung Ads channel overlap data and Samba TV ACR data. It also draws on MiQ's own contextual and location signals linked to watching, buying and browsing behaviour.
According to MiQ, the system is intended to show target audience size, potential reach, suggested spending levels across channels and each channel's contribution. It also supports scenario testing, allowing planners to compare different media mixes before a campaign is booked.
The planner sits within MiQ's Sigma platform, which is used for planning, activation and measurement. It has also been built to work with agency planning technology, including historical data, first-party data, channel inputs, CPPs and inventory commitments.
Chris Freel, Chief Revenue Officer at MiQ, described the pressures facing media planners in a market where audiences no longer follow a single viewing path.
"In an increasingly fragmented media landscape with a plethora of screens, content choices and consumption on multiple devices, total screens planning is more challenging than ever. We know that the path to meaningful reach is no longer linear - consumers are constantly moving and seamlessly switching across devices. The result is duplication of audiences - there are people we don't reach and others we reach too often - which is unnecessary wastage, particularly given industry-wide budget constraints.
"MiQ's Unified Screens Planner has been created to tackle some of the industry's biggest challenges, planning, activating and measuring the total screens landscape in one place. It brings together a range of unique data partnerships using first and third party data to provide an unparalleled view of TV consumption. It's an industry-first development for the Australian market, and one that will revolutionise cross-screen planning and measurement," Freel said.
Market focus
The release is limited to Australia and New Zealand, where broadcasters, streaming services and digital video platforms have created a complex market for agencies trying to judge how often the same viewer is reached across different services.
That complexity has pushed the industry towards broader cross-media measurement tools, particularly as advertisers demand evidence that spending on premium video, online video and traditional television is not creating unnecessary overlap.
MiQ said its planner is built to estimate maximum, deduplicated and addressable reach. The system is also intended to help agencies produce campaign reporting that shows incremental reach and channel contribution in a single view, rather than through separate reporting streams.
Vishal Shah, Head of Product and Analytics at MiQ, outlined the rationale for building a product around a broader cross-screen view.
"Australia's fragmented TV landscape has meant no single partner has owned the full picture - Linear, BVOD, SVOD, YouTube and Online Video in one place. Until now. No other tool in the market maps the full journey from budget to reach, incremental reach and optimal mix across all five screens without manual spreadsheets or siloed channels - USP is here to change that. The data spine underneath is complex by necessity; the interface is simple by design," Shah said.
MiQ was founded in London in 2010 and operates from more than 33 offices worldwide. It works with advertisers and agencies in programmatic media and has increasingly centred its product development on Sigma, its artificial intelligence-led planning and measurement platform.
The launch adds to growing competition among ad technology groups, broadcasters and measurement providers to offer agencies a clearer view of audience duplication across television and digital video, an issue that has become more important as brands spread budgets across multiple video environments.