Why is Content Labeling Taking So Long? EIDR’s Will Kreth Explains.

In my decade as a data consultant, I’ve become a big proponent of content labeling to help facilitate the linking of content across platforms and devices.  First spearheaded by Jane Clarke, CIMM’s CEO and Manager Director in 2009, the labeling initiative for both ads and content promised to result in a type of universal, industry-standard UPC code. But it has taken much longer than I personally expected for the television marketplace. Not only are we are still not there, but it seems like there has been limited progress while the number and diversity of platforms and devices proliferate and the global footprint expands.

So I sat down with Will Kreth, Executive Director, EIDR, to try to understand just what the challenges and obstacles are that are keeping us from what seems to be a no-brainer – a universally accepted labeling protocol so that every creator gets the full credit of all of the views for their content. I wanted to understand what’s going on and why it’s taking so damn long.

To some in the industry, according to Kreth, content labeling can involve metadata or behavioral tagging. But for him, content labeling takes on a much broader definition.

Charlene Weisler: What is your definition of content labeling?

Will Kreth: We think of it as unique identification of content to help the media and entertainment supply chain, to help workflows, and to help the life-cycle of a title. Content identification (through unique, machine-readable IDs) helps all of the different players / actors in the ecosystem - in the existing value chain, and also in the aspirational, as yet to-be-realized value chain.

Weisler: Who is doing it now and who is not doing it now?

Kreth: We have been strong in the film industry – with now 95% to 100% coverage at first theatrical window for all movies from the top six  (now five) Hollywood studios. However, television is a major gap for us – in that we have not cracked the code on the motivations for the networks to look at open standard, unique IDs as a way to improve audience measurement, generate incremental revenue, and/or lower costs significantly.  

Weisler: Why would TV not see it while the film industry does see it?

Kreth: For years and years, television didn’t even operate with external identifiers. Content was shared – the satellite and cable operators and broadcast networks just used internal IDs – then published spreadsheets, Word documents or PDFs of program schedule information for print TV listings and Electronic Program Guides (EPGs). So, television in the traditional world of the last 30 to 40+ years was very linear. Then, On Demand and DVRs came – and the VOD platforms developed by cable had an effort around creating VOD metadata – because they realized that they would be the ones sending the assets files out to the field to local cable head-ends. They had to describe them well so they could be ingested into broadcast automation or play-out systems. 

Weisler: How is the television landscape in content IDs structured?

Kreth: The incumbents were the duopoly between Rovi (now TiVo) and TMS (the former Tribune Media Services) which absorbed and then rebranded itself as Gracenote, and now Gracenote is part of Nielsen. The TMS ID has the lion’s share of usage in North American television broadcasting metadata. It’s the unique ID that is the incumbent. It took a lot of years to get there through competition to gain marketshare. Gracenote has become the dominant player in unique IDs in the United States, but not globally. So there is a vertically integrated play that the TMS ID is a part of that is now required by Nielsen. So you now have a unique ID for the majority of U.S. paid TV viewing tied to the ratings system for the majority of U.S. homes. Through hard work and market dominance, the TMS ID (which went from Tribune, then Gracenote and now Nielsen), has achieved somewhat of a winner-take-all-effect. 

But there are some hold-outs. Some use TiVo IDs, some don’t use IDs because they have decided they are not at the end point of the distribution chain,  and some use IDs from RedBee (formerly FYI Television) or others.  Meanwhile, some sources, like electronic program guides in all of the major set top box manufacturers, had to be standardized. That process took years to get to a certain level of quality and there are still a lot of gaps and mismatched metadata and errors. Also, the digital video recorder pushed a lot of folks towards standardization – because it insisted on the notion that if you are going to record a program – you need to know exactly when it starts and stops and what the program is. From a consumer’s point of view – it would be unacceptable if you got the wrong program at the wrong time. There was no room for guesswork. And that pushed folks towards the effort for standardization around television metadata.

Weisler: What about EIDR today?

Kreth: It’s a different world than just 10, even 5 years ago. There’s greater complexity and new business models beyond just rated linear and on-demand television (or legacy DVRs).  The challenges of multi-platform distribution, streaming, and international OTT businesses are helping convince doubters that the world could  do very well by adopting  EIDR’s open standard to precisely identify the thing itself (content labeling)  no matter where it plays or what device it plays on. Data collection and analytics are no longer a “nice to have” – they are mission critical.   With EIDR’s open ID standard becoming ubiquitous in TV,  costs would go down, innovation would go up, competition would thrive in a world where title level ID metadata is shared as a global standard - and not held in any one company’s proprietary ecosystem.

Weisler: So why is it taking so long?

Kreth: If you are a broadcaster, you would have been working for years and years to get these systems set up, to get the TMS IDs flowing, and to get them into broadcast automation systems. Switching to another title ID or even supporting, side by side, another title ID requires capital or operating expenditures and that are not often in the budget of the major networks. Unlike film – which did not have an existing solution, they had independent data services and when they saw that there could be something like a universal ISBN number for film and TV - they said, ‘sign us up’ and incubated the data model structure at Movie Labs (the research and development arm of the US film industry). So, we have work to do in television. The good news is:  We’re making great inroads with TV broadcasters in Sweden, the Nordics, the UK and EU.  Our motto has always been – “Lots of IDs, Low Cost”. We want to make acquiring and tagging labeling TV (and all video) content with unique EIDR IDs as easy, painless and inexpensive as possible.

With television – we realized we were up against existing workflows and lifecycles of how content was flowing and with all of the vendors, hardware manufacturers, suppliers and operations systems there was no one place to go. We’re starting to hear from vendors in the television industry that they’re ready to support EIDR in their software and toolsets. The world would change in an instant if one of the large US MVPDs said ‘we require EIDR IDs.’  And we see signs that may be happening with at least one of the major US MVPD’s, especially due to the demonstrable need for unique IDs in measuring a multitude of data points and KPIs, on multiple platforms, with a myriad of program titles. 

Weisler: Will, knowing what you know, what do you think the timeline is to get more than critical mass for television?

Kreth: There is a project we call EIDR 2020, where we’re pushing to start to see the major US TV distributors and vendors support EIDR alongside their existing workflows or with their existing IDs. With a sunrise period for EIDR IDs ubiquity in 2020 – it starts to create that catalyst, the critical mass to move people off of stasis and inertia and toward embracing and extending their platforms and their toolsets to support EIDR. Next year will be our tenth year - so there will be nothing greater than to see an industry-wide EIDR 2020 sunrise begin in television.

This article first appeared in TVREV.

Content Labeling and Data Transparency Initiatives Updates

When it comes to cross platform measurement, if you can’t identify a piece of content, you can’t measure it and if you can’t measure it you can’t monetize it. Further, if you don’t know what is in the dataset you’re using, the results may be suspect. That is why two major data labeling initiatives (content labeling and data transparency), recently showcased at the CIMM Conference, are poised to take cross-media measurement to the next level.

Ad-ID and EIDR for Content
Harold Geller, Executive Director, Ad-ID and Will Kreth, Executive Director, EIDR have been instrumental in creating industry standard labels that enable the seamless tracking of both ads and programming across all platforms and devices. Geller explained that now over 400 advertisers are using Ad-ID for their advertisements and in order to make the cost of entry more affordable, Ad-ID prefixes are now free to registrants. Kreth noted that programming labeling has had a positive effectthat reduces friction. EIDR has seen rapid growth recently, reaching 2 million content records as of the end of 2018.


Data Transparency Label for Data
According to David Kohl, President and CEO, TrustX, audience and identity data are the foundation for billions of dollars in marketing and media spending. “But not all data is created equal,” he warned. “It is important to create a label that tells us exactly what is inside the data.”

To that end, a data transparency label has been developed that looks like an ingredients label found on food packages. This label enables all users – both advertisers and programmers – to know what type of data is inside. This label will help answer questions such as: How did data get created? Where did it come from? Who is the owner? What audience segments are used and how was the segment constructed? Was it modeled and where did the data come from? Is it household, device or individual, an id, a cookie, a set top box, zip or address?

Both content labeling and data transparency labels are designed to provide a level of trust for the industry. For Kohl, this is just the beginning. “We are on a journey,” he explained. “We are looking for industry feedback and plan to evolve the label over time.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Tracking Content. The State of Content Labeling. An Interview with EIDR’s Will Kreth

Will Kreth, Executive Director of the Entertainment Identifier Registry Association (EIDR), is in the epicenter of the content labeling storm. Being able to completely track a piece of content no matter where it airs and how it is consumed is the Holy Grail of programmers and advertisers. 

EIDR, which stands for Entertainment Identifier Registry, is a universal unique identifier system for movie and television assets. 

Charlene Weisler: EIDR has been advocating labeling for many years. What is moving it forward now? 

Will Kreth: Economics.  As the volume of content in distribution continues to increase around the world, the outdated systems of manual workflows, title matching, reconciliation and attribution of viewership / usage are unsustainable. There’s a quote from Clyde Smith, formerly SVP of New Technology at Fox Networks - "If you can’t identify it, you can’t automate, operationalize or measure it; and if you can't measure it - you can't monetize it.”  He said it about six years ago, and it’s still true. The pathway to sustainability begins with labeling all content in a unique, persistent and machine-readable format, which is what the alpha-numeric EIDR ID provides.

Charlene Weisler: What is the current state of labeling?

Will Kreth: Today we see labeling happening in a variety of ways, often with proprietary methods that are designed for specific purposes.  Moving towards a single standard identifier, which can be embedded once and then used for any number of tracking and identification needs provides a ubiquity and simplicity that has been missing in media and entertainment.

Whether it is a new TV series for 2019, a film production taking off in 2021, or a new indie short premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this fall, we encourage everyone within the media and entertainment ecosystem to begin registering new titles with EIDR ID’s as soon as the greenlight on the project is given. The bottom-line is: earlier the better. If EIDR ID’s are attached to content from the beginning of the project, industry leaders, agencies and all parties involved will have a better understanding of what content is being referenced throughout its lifecycle.

Existing titles are also being registered with EIDR to take advantage of the benefits of this persistent identifier as content continues to be made available across an ever-growing distribution network. 

Charlene Weisler: Do you see the industry coalescing around a standard? 

Will Kreth: Yes. And while it’s taken a few years, the dynamic power of open standards to drive supply-chain automation has incontrovertible precedents in packaged goods (with UPC/EAN codes) and in books (with ISBN). We are proud to be part of the TAXI Complete (Trackable Asset Cross-Platform Identification) initiative, which was recently published as a pair of open standards by SMPTE to embed asset tracking into both content and advertising using an audio watermark. This initiative, led by CIMM (Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) was started in 2013 for the purpose of setting standards and identifying the most effective means of multi-channel asset tracking.

Charlene Weisler: How will standards in labeling impact media?

Will Kreth: I’ve been chatting recently with folks from the book publishing world and the CPG (consumer packaged goods) industries - and they can’t imagine a world without unique IDs in their international supply chains. The only surprising thing about film and television is that it has taken until this decade to see global, non-proprietary IDs grow in adoption.

The ability to embed standardized identifiers throughout the media ecosystem will have a significant impact on the efficiency of cross-media workflows for both media companies and marketers. Television networks and digital content publishers will be able to use these unique IDs to more effectively create and manage integrated multiscreen experiences. The standards will also replace the need for legacy title matching processes and ease numerous inefficiencies in the cross-platform video distribution and measurement workflow.

Charlene Weisler: Is there a difference in ad and programming labeling efforts? If so, what?

Will Kreth: The biggest difference is in the ID, and who maintains the registry of data, but the process is the same.  While EIDR is specific to content assets, such as films, television shows, shorts and online video content, Ad-ID is used to track video advertising assets. Utilizing both Ad-ID and EIDR IDs, enables near real-time reporting for ad verification and audience measurement allowing marketers to better optimize live and on-demand advertising similar to how digital advertising is today.

Charlene Weisler: Where do you see this effort three years from today?

Will Kreth: From an automation perspective, by the year 2020, we expect to see several of the world’s top media companies requiring EIDR ID’s from all their business partners. The universal implementation of open standards within the industry will not only unleash innovation but according to a study by Ernst & Young in 2013, it will save the media and entertainment industry millions of dollars annually, and provide new opportunities for revenue generation.

Charlene Weisler: Any advice for programmers, advertisers and marketers on this issue?

Will Kreth: The internet is built on open standards and universally accepted, and we’re still seeing the resilient power of incremental value creation that has across the world. Looking forward, the Internet of Things wouldn’t be possible without open standards. Like a domain name URL, or an IP address, or even a telephone number — EIDR exists to bring an open and unique ID to all commercially-available audio/visual content. The sooner full adoption arrives, the better it will be for thousands of companies and the amazing work they bring to our screens, homes and theaters daily. 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Cross Platform Measurement with Help From CIMM

One of the most frenetic areas of measurement development today is in cross platform. Creative and scalable solutions are being crafted that enable programmers and advertisers to gain a more complete picture of how the usage of various media platforms compare to and blend within each other.  There is no standard yet, but there are a myriad of possible semi-solutions that can link some, but not yet all, platforms under one metric. Progress is being made and it is only a matter of time (and data) before we get to a complete and scale-able measurement.

CIMM’s annual Summit this past week focused on cross platform measurement. True to its name and mission, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement seeks to transform the way audiences are measured. Managing Director Jane Clarke has a clear vision of CIMM’s mission in cross platform and has been a great advocate of advancements in measurement. She said, “This year’s Summit showcased that exciting new methodologies to better understand the complexities of cross-platform media measurement are being formed, and the industry as a whole is taking notice.”

The half day meeting included an update on CIMM’s TAXI (Trackable Asset Cross Platform Identifier) Initiative which CIMM launched two years ago and which CIMM continues to support in the form of project investment and analyses. TAXI’s importance is being recognized. Jane explained that “the widespread industry adoption of Ad-ID and EIDR coding for all advertising and video content assets, the goal of our TAXI initiative, received resounding support from Summit attendees.”

TAXI, with its advocacy of a UPC type standard for content (both programming and advertising) across all platforms, is one very important area of need in developing cogent measurement. And the need goes beyond measurement. Citing the four “R’s of asset identification, Research, Royalties, Rights and Residuals, it is clear that the importance of verifying asset exposure across platforms serves many purposes. While TAXI's first recommendation is to register assets using Ad-ID and EIDR, there is also an initiative to develop an open standard for binding the metadata to the asset, so it won't be lost through transcoding and compression. This may be with a watermark or fingerprint technology (ACR) or by using the closed captioning space in TV broadcasting. 

In a panel on the Roadmap for Cross-Platform “Exposure” Measurement, the value of asset identification was estimated to be $2.5 billion in recurring economic benefit to the industry. So this issue is no small stakes and the challenges to overcome are not difficult, costly or insurmountable. Janice Finkel-Greene of MAGNA Global gave one example. “Without a standard, it is hard to get show titles to match”. Titles are input by humans and even a simple miss-spelling can cause hours of extra clean-up work. Once a standard code is appended to all content, the match will be based on the code itself and not the capricious spelling of the content title. As Harold Geller of Ad-ID explained, “If you can’t identify it, you can’t operationalize it. If you can’t operationalize it you can’t measure it. And if you can’t measure it you can’t monetize it.” That in itself should be a compelling argument for the adoption of a standard coding system.

ESPN has embarked on an ambitious hybrid solution for cross platform measurement with Project Blueprint combining TV, Radio, PC and Mobile data via Arbitron and comScore. As ESPN’s Artie Bulgrin explains, “The knowledge gaps about how people consume media across multiple platforms are growing and so are the business implications. Our goal is not to create new currencies, but to provide an essential layer of research that begins to mitigate those gaps with a scalable, on-going measurement solution. What makes Project Blueprint so unique is that it combines the breadth of reporting from ‘big data’ measures (census analytics) with the depth of persons-level data from single-source panels.” 

 

All in all, the CIMM Summit proved to be an industry changing event, moving asset identification and cross platform measurement forward. “Our event was a success,” Jane Clarke said, “and CIMM will continue sparking discussions to help marketers make smarter ad buy decisions and receive better return on their ad dollar investments.” 

A solution to cross platform measurement appears closer than ever.