EDO, an advertising technology firm co-founded by actor and filmmaker Edward Norton, has been found liable for breach of contract by a federal jury.
The company must pay $18.3 million in damages to iSpot, a rival whose data was improperly obtained and then marketed to clients under EDO’s banner, the jury determined.
The verdict was delivered Thursday in U.S. Court for the Central District of California in L.A. EDO’s lawyers are planning to appeal the decision.
According to iSpot’s original complaint in 2021, EDO unfairly accessed iSpot’s proprietary data, replicated it and passed it off to clients as its own original work. They “tricked” iSpot into signing the then-fledgling company as a client and then spent three-and-a-half years modeling its business and products on iSpot’s offerings, the suit said.
“Unbeknownst to iSpot – and in blatant breach of its promises and representations – EDO was developing its own competing products and TV monitoring and analytics service while an iSpot customer, and was using iSpot’s intellectual property, data, and designs to do so,” lawyers for iSpot later asserted in an amended complaint in 2023.
Norton co-founded Entertainment Data Oracle (EDO) in 2015 with Daniel Nadler. Nortain is the company’s chairman, which for most of its run has been overseen by CEO Kevin Krim, who formerly led the digital operations of Bloomberg and CNBC. Unlike with other celebrity investors with wandering eyes and interests, Norton has remained active and has frequently spoken on behalf of EDO, though he was not personally named in the iSpot lawsuit or called to testify during the trial.
“Sadly, in this industry, when companies can’t innovate, they litigate,” EDO said in a statement provided to Deadline. “We see this for what it is – iSpot’s desperate attempt to slow down a smaller, smarter competitor and distract us from doing what we do best, delivering superior results for our clients.”
The jury sided with EDO on half of iSpot’s claims, the statement goes on to note. Even so, it continued, “We’re still disappointed that the decision on the other claim misinterpreted the complexity of events from a decade ago. The jury’s awarded damages represent a fraction of the amount iSpot demanded and shows the outlandish nature of their argument.”
The case played out against a backdrop of dynamic change in the advertising business reflecting significant shifts in viewer habit. Ad dollars have shifted from traditional linear television to streaming and social media in recent years as cord-cutting has shrunken the pay-TV bundle. Nielsen, who maintains the dominant position in measuring TV ratings and the reach of ads, has come under attack in recent years as it has grappled with the onset of streaming. While ads once were a small part of streaming, today all major subscription players, including Netflix, are making major ad pushes.
Disney and EDO expanded their partnership in 2023, with streaming at the center of their renewed agreement.
Venture capital has flowed into a number of upstarts looking to unseat Nielsen, among them iSpot and EDO, who occupy different pieces of turf in the media ecosystem but share the view that Nielsen’s methods are outdated. During an interview last May at an event organized by the trade group IAB, Norton said the panel-derived pieces of data that are core to Nielsen are “Stone Age tools compared to what we all expect.”
EDO has been owned by private equity firm Shamrock since 2022.