Cross-platform video measurement: A guide to TOVA Post-Buy for advertisers

What is TOVA Post-Buy?

TOVA Post-Buy is a measurement solution that estimates actual net reach and frequency, as well as contact volumes, for linear TV and broadcasters’ streaming services (Broadcaster Video on Demand – BVOD). At a later stage, campaigns on international platforms and streaming services will also be included.

To achieve this, the methodology relies on two crucial data streams:

• The CIM TV panel (TAM, Television Audience Measurement), which, with consumer consent, provides the “ground truth” regarding viewer profiling, household co-viewing habits, and deduplicated reach.
• Ad-server data (delivery logs), which deliver highly detailed impression counts at device level.

By linking demographic data and viewing patterns from panel households with ad-server data (through techniques such as pattern recognition and statistical fusion) TOVA Post-Buy creates a reliable benchmark to accurately measure who is actually watching your ads.

Why is TOVA Post-Buy relevant for advertisers?

For media planners and advertisers, raw digital impressions only tell part of the story. ToVA Post-Buy is highly relevant because it bridges the gap between a delivered digital impression and the actual viewer of the advertisement.

Here is how it can elevate your video strategy:

• From raw impressions to real profiled impacts: One of the blind spots in digital measurement is that a TV screen can be watched by multiple people, and the viewer is not necessarily the registered account holder. TOVA Post-Buy uses “Contacts per Impression” (CPI) tables to convert standard ad impressions into fully profiled impacts, accurately estimating the demographics and volumes of actual co-viewers in the room.
• A unified cross-platform overview: The system’s modelling engine systematically estimates reach at VOD platform level, combines reach and frequency across all VOD platforms, and ultimately merges reach and frequency across both linear TV and VOD. This provides a holistic, deduplicated view of your campaign’s true reach.
• Privacy by design: In an era of strict data regulations, TOVA Post-Buy operates with a privacy-compliant architecture. Census-level data from each broadcaster is kept strictly separated and independently managed, ensuring that only securely aggregated reports are exchanged within the modelling engine.

What will the outcome be?

For advertisers and media agencies, the end result will consist of accessible, comprehensive, and deduplicated campaign evaluations, delivered directly into a post-campaign reporting tool or your preferred third-party software.

To illustrate how these results look in practice, here is a concrete example from the first tests with TOVA Post-Buy:

• Example of broad targeting: In a sample campaign targeting adults aged 25 to 54, the system measured 42,408 filtered impressions. Using the TOVA methodology to account for co-viewing and actual audience composition, these impressions were converted into 50,003 contacts within the target group and 5,751 contacts outside the target group. This resulted in a ratio of 1.18 in-target contacts per impression, demonstrating an in-target accuracy of nearly 90%.

As this example demonstrates, TOVA Post-Buy offers unprecedented transparency into how effectively your targeting performs, going beyond the basic demographics of registered accounts.

A market demo will be presented before the summer, with a more complete launch planned for autumn 2026. For advertisers, this signals a near future in which video investments across multiple platforms can be measured, evaluated, and optimised with full transparency.

You can find more information about TOVA on our website via this link.