Getting the Industry to Work Together Towards Attribution and Cross Media Measurement Solutions. An Interview with CIMM’s Jane Clarke

On February 3 and 4, CIMM, as part of the ARF, presents its 10^th Annual Cross-Platform Video Measurement & Data Summit. CIMM has been focusing on attribution for a few years and has helped spearhead efforts to get the industry to work together. 

Where are we with attribution and cross media measurement? Jane Clarke, CEO and Managing Director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), explains.

Charlene Weisler: How close are we to true attribution? 

Jane Clarke: The challenge with complete multi-touch attribution is identity resolution, and particularly cross-channel identity resolution.  Most of the ID resolution solutions can’t incorporate impressions from the walled gardens with identity attached since the walled gardens see this as a data security challenge.  Their POV is that they are protecting the identity of their customers within their platform.  The WFA initiative was created primarily to address this challenge: how to get impressions linked with an identity out of the walled gardens.  The initial approach is called Virtual ID (VID), which is a probabilistic model that also groups customers into segments.  They’re also working on a Secure Media Identifier (SUMID), which should be announced soon.  There are also many commercial approaches to linking identity across TV and digital media, but only a few of them have managed to incorporate secure ad impression data from the walled gardens. 

Currently, attribution is being conducted only for digital media, but increasingly for TV, using Smart TV or STB data or commingled datasets.  These approaches create exposed and unexposed groups of customers and measure outcomes against them to see if those exposed have a lift in the outcome metric.  In 2020, CIMM completed a study on Unpacking Data Inputs into TV Attribution, which pinpointed some of the challenges with getting consistent results across providers and suggested best practices, such as standardizing ad measurement and combining Smart TV and STB data.

Weisler: What are the best practices for cross media measurement and who is doing it correctly?

Clarke: There aren’t enough successful solutions to cross-media measurement for best practices to have emerged yet.  However, vendors can be evaluated by how far along they are with the four building blocks for cross-media measurement, which are: 1) Standardized and scaled granular Smart TV and STB data for content and ads combined to be as nationally representative as possible; 2) Standardized digital content and ad exposure data across sites and mobile apps; 3) A single-source cross-media measurement panel, or a linked combination of single media measurement panels, to calibrate the large “census-like” datasets; and 4) a solution for ID resolution to connect all the datasets and deduplicate them.  CIMM has produced recommended best practices in some of the areas, such as combining Smart TV and STB Data and TV Attribution.

Weisler: Where do you see media measurement one year from now?

Clarke: Now that media companies and TV OEMs are “data owners,” more walled gardens are being created.  This means that there will be even more pressure to perfect solutions in development from the walled gardens for secure encrypted ID resolution.   Additionally, more companies will try to authenticate their customers, to enable more personalized experiences and better measurement.  Regulations surrounding privacy and data security will become clearer, so companies will be able to adapt their solutions.  Nielsen will most likely offer “ad” measurement for TV by this time next year.  This will be a big step towards comparable metrics across media.  There may be some changes coming in which TV OEMs are willing to license their data for measurement purposes, since they are increasingly wanting to use the data for their own ad sales purposes.  So, progress will be made by a number of the vendors working on cross-media measurement solutions, but new technical challenges will also present themselves.  I don’t think that the WFA/ANA solution to ID resolution will end up working for TV, as it is currently envisioned, so alternative solutions will need to be developed.  The WFA/ANA solution is designed to dedupe individual devices vs. the way that Smart TV and STB data are deduplicated at the household level.  

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

Helping the Industry Move to Cross-Media Measurement. CIMM’s 10th Annual Measurement and Data Summit.

Every year CIMM launches its Annual Cross-Platform Video Measurement & Data Summit which brings together experts from the industry. This year, its tenth, is virtual and can offer insights into how the industry is adjusting during the pandemic and beyond.

Charlene Weisler: What are the biggest issues facing media measurement at this time?

Jane Clarke: Media and cross-media measurement is viewed differently depending if you are a buyer or a seller.  From a buyer POV (marketer/agency), the biggest issue is complete cross-channel ROI measurement, which includes all marketing, advertising and promotional aspects of a campaign or ongoing marketing effort.  Marketers try to link one common impressions metric across all forms of advertising and marketing, by connecting them to an ID-graph that can provide ID resolution across all touchpoints and link the impressions to an outcome KPI, such as sales, site visits, app downloads, offline store/restaurant visits or other metric.  From the POV of a media seller, they are typically trying to deduplicate reach across traditional and digital forms of their media, such as between all forms of TV/premium video, and prove outcomes for their inventory. 

Weisler: What initiatives are in the forefront of solving for these issues? 

Clarke: The Media Committee of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has published a Framework for Cross-Media Measurement, along with a Technical Blueprint.  The main goal is to deduplicate reach across the walled gardens and other digital publishers and TV, in a way that protects data security for the data owners.  The WFA design is being adapted to work as a Pilot Test by ISBA in the U.K. and the ANA in the U.S.  However, since the design was originally from a digital data security POV, it has been challenging to incorporate TV data, which uses different methodologies in different markets.  There are also many commercial initiatives to address these measurement challenges, as well as proprietary systems created or in development from agencies, media companies and MVPD consortiums. 

Additionally, the MRC launched their cross-media measurement standards, and the IAB is working on a replacement for the cookie.  CIMM has completed initiatives aimed at addressing some of the four building blocks for cross-media measurement: 1) Standardized and scaled granular Smart TV and STB data for content and ads combined to be as nationally representative as possible; 2) Standardized digital content and ad exposure data across sites and mobile apps; 3) A single-source cross-media measurement panel, or a linked combination of single media measurement panels, to calibrate the large “census-like” datasets; and 4) a solution for ID resolution to connect all the datasets and deduplicate them.  We just launched Best Practices in Combining Smart TV and STB Data, and last fall we published to our site a design for TV Data Interoperability & ID Resolution.

Weisler: Has the pandemic impacted any measurement issues and if so, how and what? 

Clarke: TO panel measurement has been more challenged than other research during the pandemic, since it’s been hard to recruit new panelists when they don’t want to allow home visits.  Existing panels, such as Nielsen, have had challenges replacing panelists and monitoring issues with current panelists and maintaining compliance with “checking in for person’s measurement,” as more panelists stay in the panels longer.  New panels have been challenged to launch, due to these same considerations. 

Weisler: What will be the most impactful efforts we can do to improve measurement? 

Clarke: Data owners need to agree with the methods being developed to protect data security, in order to agree to make their data available to industry solutions.  Standardizing digital video app and site player usage is critical to cross-media measurement.  Many companies use Conviva as a standardized mobile SDK for monitoring customer experience within an app, and it gathers second-by-second viewing data that is standard across their customers, but the data are still owned by the media company.  It would be great for the media companies to standardize around this solution. 

Weisler: How close are we to an industry effort?

Clarke: It has been a big change to get marketers involved in creating the solutions for cross-media measurement, since they have leverage.  However, the TV industry needs to decide which solution it wants to support.  The different media companies, MVPDs and consortia such as OpenAP, Ampersand and Xandr all have different proprietary approaches to creating a unified and standardized platform to plan, activate, measure and conduct attribution against all their TV/premium video inventory.  They need to come together around one solution before they can collaborate additionally with the walled gardens to deliver the solution that marketers seek.

 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

 

The 4As Examine Media Measurement Priorities at Advertising Week

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

CIMM Cross Platform and Video Measurement and Data Summit Reports Progress

At CIMM’s annual Cross Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit, now in its 8^th year,  Jane Clarke, CEO and Managing Director, CIMM announced the launch of TAXI Complete, a long term initiative dedicated to facilitating cross platform measurement through the use of content labels for programming (EDIR) and ads (Ad-ID).

Panels on labeling, metrics and attribution measurement, deduplicated reach, audience based buying and innovations from CES filled the agenda. Praise was offered from the panelists to Nielsen and comScore for their hard work to keep pace with media measurement, but most agreed that more needed to be done.

Issues include: Walled gardens of data that limit the ability of companies to accurately measure true attribution results, the myriad of advanced advertising solutions from a range of competing companies that are not easily comparable and the, as of now, quiet acquiescence of consumers regarding privacy and the use of their personal data in the age of GDPR.

Clarke’s progress report offers a ray of hope to these issues. She noted that we are closer than ever before in measuring unduplicated reach across media, we are moving more towards content ratings (though still dealing with blind spots), we are improving our ability to measure attribution through smart TV and STB ad exposure data and we have standardized content ID watermarks for content identification.

Some have called for commercial minute ratings, noting the obsolescence of C-3 and C-7. Others called for greater data transparency in order to more fully understand the quality and applicability of the data they are suing. The landscape keeps changing and expanding. There are more and more viewing platforms and data sets that will need to find ways to be incorporated as media consumption behaviors evolve. Self-driving cars, for example, will have screens so we can entertain ourselves while traveling.

The upshot: Obviously much has been accomplished, but just a clearly there is still a lot more work to do.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

For more insights and updates on measurement, keep an eye out for Cynopsis’ annual Measurement & Data Conference this summer.

Advancing Cross Media Measurement. Takeaways from the CIMM Cross Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit

 

To those of us in the media world, the discussion of attribution and cross platform measurement has been going on for decades. Waiting for solutions has been painfully slow. But in the most recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit (now in its 8^th year) the big reveal was that not only has significant progress been made in attribution and cross platform measurement, feverish activity has been taking place behind the scenes for years. 

The reason is that it’s simply not easy to form new metrics and protocols between the need for consensus across all types of companies and the persistent evolution and expansion of technologies.

For Jane Clarke, CEO Managing Director of CIMM, 2018 was a year of significant advancements. At last year’s conference, CIMM announced a Measurement Manifesto to keep the industry focused on cross platform measurement. Her work on content labeling has been pivotal to stitching all pieces of video together across screens. This year Clarke announced the launch of TAXI Complete (Trackable Asset Cross Platform Identification) which is the creation of audio watermarks for content (EIDR) and ads (Ad-ID). It will, according to Clarke, “Advance cross platform video measurement and bring more measurement to TV.”

For me, the major takeaways were:

Ø  While content labeling gains traction, deduplication is pivotal to getting to a reliable and adoptable cross platform measurement currency.

If it can’t be measured it can’t be monetized and if it can’t be measured accurately, monetization will be flawed. Content labeling is continuing apace with more companies adopting the coding and the cost of entry to enroll has been lowered. One next step includes the advancement of deduplicated reach measurement to help accuracy. 

According to Beth Rockwood, Senior Vice President, Ad Sales Research, Turner, “Questions can be answered well with deduplicated reach. It’s an important tool and fits into context of marketing mix models and attribution.”

Ø  Measurement challenges will continue as we try to keep pace with evolving technologies and how consumers use them.

As Krishan Bhatia, Executive Vice President, Business Operations and Strategy, NBCU, noted, “The transformation of the consumption of video on a cross platform basis … has accelerated in the past 18-24 months. Devices are driving it (while) measurement has not caught up or stayed ahead of the curve.“

Evolving technologies such as voice assistants, “are making measurement more difficult,” Jack Smith, Chief Product Officer, Global Investment, GroupM pointed out. “It is happening in apps that are already walled gardens and operating systems are also intermediaries which can control pricing, ordering products and recommendations instead of having a direct relationship with the brand.” These, along with screens in self-driving cars, provide new viewing venues and experiences. As an industry we need to understand how it all works … and morphs over time. 

Ø  Privacy and Transparency need to be addressed. We can no longer kick the can down the road.

“Privacy and data issues will become more important,” stated to Laura Nathanson, Executive Vice President Revenue and Operations, Disney Advertising Sales. “Consumers will demand more privacy and more walls,” she added. But how privacy balances with transparency is still to be discussed. For others there is not enough transparency, at least when it comes to data labeling. 

To that end, part of the content labeling initiative includes  a data transparency label which points to aspects of the data and its collection such as how the data got created and where it came from. The careful balance between privacy and transparency, including the impact of GDPR in Europe on the U.S., require us to continue the discussion and create protocols. 

Ø  As an industry we need to work together to develop and establish adoptable measurements.

“We need to hit the pause button and up level the conversation,” stated Radha Subramanyam, Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS. She was referring to the clamor of competing voices around measurement today. “I love the innovation in measurement and the abundance of products and granular data,” she continued, “But are we any closer to making things make sense? My call is for a common sense framework. Stop the noise and see what we are really trying to solve for.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com