MediaRadar / Vivvix

Media sellers prospecting national and regional accounts, agencies pitching new business, brand teams watching competitors, and political operatives. MediaRadar reports more than 20,000 users. It is priced and sold for organizations rather than individuals, and it is normally a corporate subscription rather than something a single local seller buys.

To show what advertising actually ran. Not what a market might spend and not what a station booked, but which brand placed which creative, in which medium, in which market, over what flight, at what estimated cost. MediaRadar's database tracks more than $200 billion in annual media spend across upwards of four million brands; Vivvix's footprint covers more than $250 billion in media spend and detailed descriptors for over 35 million creative assets.

The 2023 acquisition brought local TV, radio, search and out-of-home into MediaRadar's coverage, along with Canada, and included CMAG (Campaign Media Analysis Group), the political ad tracking unit.

Multiple collection methods running in parallel: broadcast and cable monitoring of actual airings, print issue capture, digital ad crawling and panel-based collection for display, video and social, app monitoring, and out-of-home records. Spend is then estimated by applying rate models to observed occurrences, since almost no one discloses what they actually paid.

The corporate history is worth knowing, because it explains the depth of the archive. The business began as LNA (Leading National Advertisers) and BAR (Broadcast Advertiser Reports), became CMR (Competitive Media Reporting), was relaunched by Kantar as Vivvix in January 2023 combining Kantar Media's syndicated coverage with Numerator's creative intelligence, and was sold to MediaRadar in November 2023.

Occurrence data is close to real time — days, not months, for monitored broadcast and digital channels. Spend estimates lag further, because rate models are applied after the fact and revised.

The important caution is directional. Occurrences are observed and reliable. Dollar estimates are modeled, and in local broadcast they can be well off actual negotiated rates, particularly in small markets where published card rates bear little relationship to what anyone pays. Quote the flight; be careful quoting the spend.

It is the only way to walk into a meeting knowing what a prospect has been running elsewhere. For a category prospect that buys regionally, seeing that they have been in TV and streaming but not audio, or that they went dark in your market while continuing in the next one, reframes the entire conversation. For political, CMAG's tracking is the standard reference for what is being spent and where.

• Occurrence data — continuous, refreshed daily to weekly by channel.
• Spend estimates — typically monthly, with revisions.
• Creative libraries — added continuously as ads are captured.
• Political (CMAG) — near-continuous through an election cycle.

Broadcast monitoring identifies airings by audio and video signature. Digital collection combines crawlers, panels and tags. Creatives are captured, deduplicated and tagged with descriptors — brand, product, category, message — which is what makes the library searchable rather than merely large. Spend is imputed by multiplying observed occurrences against modeled rates by daypart, market and medium.

Both the MediaRadar and Vivvix platforms lean on machine classification to tag creative and to power prospecting recommendations, which is how a database of that scale stays navigable.