There is strength in numbers. And I don’t just mean that in
terms of all of the data being gathered and transacted upon in our industry
today. I also mean it to suggest that we need to work together - from networks
to agencies to the range of other media oriented businesses - to finally solve
for cross platform measurement.
The conversation on cross platform measurement has been
going on for over a decade through the work of several media organizations.
But, frankly, these were often siloed efforts that gathered fleeting attention and
struggled for cohesive industry action... until now. The push for an industry
standard cross platform measurement is not only gaining momentum, it is also
consolidating efforts across cooperating media entities.
As part of Advertising Week, the 4As hosted a panel titled
“Media Measurement Priorities” that covered the joint efforts of leading
industry entities to facilitate cross platform measurement and to decide, as an
industry, what media measurement needs to look like in this new media
environment. “What we have now really doesn’t fit the bill,” noted Louis Jones,
Executive Vice President, Media and Data, 4As.
He added that, “We need to have a collaborative point of
view,” that also takes into account the needs of agencies. From there, the 4As set
out to coordinate the efforts of companies and organizations working on the
issue and published a whitepaper titled, Media
Measurement Priorities,” as the first salvo.
The paper set
the stage for discussion of the most important priorities from an agency’s
perspective.
Here are the top five:
1.
Unduplicated Reach
2.
Currency
3.
Short term versus long term
4.
Walled garden and identity graphs
5.
Attribution
Agency Perspective
Even for
these top priorities, there may be flexibility in the solution. Take, for
example, Currency. Historically, the TV industry has transacted on a strict set
of metrics for currency. For Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom
Media Group, “We are in a world that is complicated enough that if everyone had
access to the right underlying data, different partners could agree to trade on
different metrics and that would be okay.” His point was that agencies seek
impressions on specific target audiences and the way these impression are
valued may vary across different platforms.
For Ed
Gaffney, Managing Partner, Director of Implementation Research and Marketplace
Analytics, GroupM, the currency just has to be well understood, transparent and
stable. “We can have multiple currencies,” he explained, “We have them now,”
with digital and TV and even within TV there are a range of metrics. “As long
as everyone knows how they are counted, and can use that data, for both sellers
and buyers, it works well.”
For Gaffney,
Unduplicated Reach is critical to address waste. But the barrier, according to
Steuer, is that the measurement currency for TV “is based on volumetrics and
not real humans” and is delivered, “on the aggregate and not the individual. We
need a census to tie together and understand device delivery to actual humans.”
Industry Perspective
In addition to agencies, there are businesses and
organizations that are deeply involved in the measurement discussion. The MRC
has been pivotal in establishing cross media measurement standards. George
Ivie, Executive Director Media Ratings Council, explained that the MRC has been
involved in a two year effort resulting in a brand new industry standard for
video that was just released in early September. Three hundred 300 people and 175
companies participated. “There was a lot of discussion about measurement of
exposure and how important it is as a building block to understand who saw your
ads and how many times they saw it and the ability to de-duplicate,” he noted.
This standard provides the framework for equalizing the
exposures across platforms and de-duplicating it across some general
principles: Establishing a common set of
granularity, second to second level starting with counting impressions and then
equalizing them as much as possible across the various video outlets, viewability,
measurement and requiring invalid traffic and fraud filtering, the ability to
measure people – demographics and targets – completes and duration weighted
view of impressions so as to measure how long the viewable conditions
persisted.
The reaction from the industry was both accepting and
guarded. Radha Subramanyam, Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS, noted
that measuring, “viewability is a good thing. Nobody wants invalid traffic.
Duration is important. But the devil is in the details. Implementation versus
theory – there is a big gap there.” Brian Smallwood, “Different advertisers are
going to want to transact on different measures. This (MRC report) is one way
of standardizing it but there are other parts of the ecosystem that want to
trade or operate differently.”
If you ask me, an effort that has created the foundation for
the trans- corporate cooperation today has been through CIMM. This organization
has been working on universal content labeling to help stitch together content
on various platforms and devices through Ad-ID and EIDR. Without a UPC-like
code, there is no industry wide way to insure that content is accurately being
captured wherever it airs. Jane Clarke, CEO and Managing Director, CIMM, noted.
“It is an evolving time in television
and we don’t have a granular, nationally representative impressions-based TV
measurement system in place right now,” she explained, because the data is
siloed, behind walled gardens and not shared.
But, as there is strength in numbers, the first powerful
step has now been taken. “The tech environment innovates. Technology improves. The
standard is a first step in a long journey,” Ivie concluded.
This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com
No comments:
Post a Comment