PTAB

IPR2019-00790

Free Stream Media Corp v. Alphonso Inc

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Method for Determining Effectiveness of an Advertising Campaign
  • Brief Description: The ’755 patent describes a method and system for measuring the effectiveness, or "lift," of a digital advertising campaign on the viewership of an audio-visual work. The system collects and stores viewership data from monitored devices in a first database and ad exposure data in a second database, then matches identifiers between the two to calculate the viewership increase attributable to the ad campaign.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Vinson, Ray, and Banasiewicz - Claims 1-6, 10-18, and 22-24 are obvious over Vinson in view of Ray and Banasiewicz.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Vinson (Application # 2013/0275205), Ray (Application # 2017/0034593), and Banasiewicz (a 2013 marketing analytics textbook).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that the independent claims describe a conventional system for computing advertising lift using well-known components. Vinson taught a content advertisement effectiveness system that collected viewership data (Content Presentation Data) and ad exposure data (Advertisement Presentation Data) to correlate ad exposure with subsequent viewing of the promoted content. Vinson disclosed calculating viewership percentages for both an exposed group and an unexposed (control) group, which represents a lift metric. However, Petitioner characterized Vinson as a single-screen solution. Ray improved upon this by teaching cross-screen measurement techniques for assessing advertising performance, including building "device graphs" to link multiple devices (e.g., tablet, mobile, TV) to a single consumer using identifiers like a common IP address. Finally, Banasiewicz, a textbook on marketing analytics, explicitly taught the standard industry formula for calculating a lift metric as (Test - Control) / Control, providing the precise calculation recited in dependent claims.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSA) would combine Vinson’s foundational ad effectiveness system with Ray’s cross-screen teachings to adapt the system to the modern, multi-device digital marketplace. Strong market forces and profit incentives would have motivated a POSA to improve Vinson’s system for more accurate ad campaign assessment across the various devices consumers use. A POSA would have been further motivated to incorporate the standard, widely used lift formula from Banasiewicz into the combined Vinson/Ray system to produce a normalized, industry-recognized metric that is useful to advertisers for assessing campaign performance.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner asserted a POSA would have a high expectation of success because the combination involved applying predictable and well-understood concepts. Integrating cross-device data matching (Ray) into a data analysis framework (Vinson) and applying a standard mathematical formula (Banasiewicz) used rudimentary computer technology and known advertising principles to yield predictable results.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Vinson, Ray, Banasiewicz, and York - Claims 25-29 are obvious over Vinson in view of Ray and Banasiewicz, and further in view of York.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Vinson (Application # 2013/0275205), Ray (Application # 2017/0034593), Banasiewicz (a 2013 marketing analytics textbook), and York (Application # 2009/0030780).
  • Core Argument for this Ground: This ground addressed claims 25-29, which add limitations related to device proximity, such as for out-of-home advertising. The core combination of Vinson, Ray, and Banasiewicz provided the foundational system as argued in Ground 1.
    • Prior Art Mapping: The incremental prior art, York, taught a method for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns on media devices in public places. York explicitly taught that ad exposure can be defined as an "opportunity to see," which could be determined by a consumer traveling in "close enough proximity to see and/or hear the media device." York disclosed calculating the "lift" by comparing the behavior of consumers exposed to the public ad versus a control group. This directly taught using physical proximity as a proxy for ad exposure to measure campaign effectiveness.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSA would be motivated to incorporate York's proximity-based exposure logic into the cross-platform system of Vinson and Ray to extend its capabilities to out-of-home advertising, such as the "digital billboards" mentioned in Ray. This would allow advertisers to measure the effectiveness of a broader range of ad inventory. The motivation was driven by the commercial need to justify advertising spend on all platforms, including public displays, by tracking their reach and impact.
    • Expectation of Success: Success was asserted to be highly predictable. Using location data to determine if a mobile device was near a fixed advertisement and presuming exposure is a simple, common-sense concept that reflects background knowledge in the advertising industry. Combining this straightforward logic with the data-processing system of Vinson/Ray was a simple extension of known techniques.

4. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-6, 10-18, and 22-29 of the ’755 patent as unpatentable.