Comcast’s Look Back at 2020 and Look Ahead to 2021

This has been an unusually challenging time for prognostication. The once-in-a-generation pandemic and the current political environment have upended expectations and has created what some believe is a “new normal.” 

How are the advertising and publishing spheres of media looking back and looking forward? Comcast FreeWheel offers a look back at 2020 while Comcast Advertising looks ahead to 2021.

Programmers 2020 Look Back

2020 was a year of major changes from the global pandemic to the Black Lives Matter movement to the U.S. Elections and aftermath. But the first look at the year 2020 began with a push forward on addressability with Comcast FreeWheel’s initiative on enabling addressability.

 

The full force of the global pandemic hit the market in March, changing viewing patterns across dayparts, devices and platforms. According to Comcast FreeWheel, in the first half of 2020, premium video views increase 17% year-over-year and premium video ad views increase by 32% in the U.S. Europe saw a significant increase in TV viewership as well with average daily viewing per household up to 6 hours and 25 minutes per day on average from 90 minutes. Tent pole events had mixed performances with the Superbowl achieving a five year ratings high while the Oscars slumped and the Olympics in Japan were postponed.

Certain advertising categories benefited from consumers sheltering at home, such as Food, while other categories such as Travel held more optimism for an eventual recovery in 2020 than actually happened. Sports returned by the start of summer, registering huge increases in viewership especially for Baseball, Hockey and Basketball. Notably, by the fall, more sports resumed including Tennis, Cycling and Rugby. Programmers, anxious to offer more viewing options to content starved consumers, launched a range of streaming services including Peacock from NBCU.

Certainly the impact of Black Lives Matter in the summer brought into the forefront the malignant and enduring impact of structural racism which expanded beyond the U.S. into the global zeitgeist, forcing the media world to lean in to be part of the change.

As the year progressed, Upfront was proving to be very different from prior years with smaller-than-normal and delayed events. Adding to this was the uncertainty of TV schedules with delays in production due to the pandemic and advertisers buying closer to program airings because of the uncertainty.

As 2020 wound down, the world braced for a COVID-19 resurgence and further lockdowns. But there are signs of optimism and hope for 2021. A FreeWheel survey of 500 European Marketers reveals that when it comes to advanced TV budgets, 84% expect spend to grow in the next 12 months.

Agencies 2021 Look Forward

For agencies, 2020 has been a year of adversity, complexity and, yes, opportunity. According to Comcast Advertising, Measurement has risen to the top of priorities for both the buy side and sell side of the business. Comcast has found that, “the whole industry is looking for workable solutions,” in an area that has historically lagged behind in innovation, relying on legacy data sets.

But 2021 looks to be a very different measurement environment. For Michael Law, President Amplifi USA, “As consumers have clearly shown they are in control of their experiences with brands and with media, it’s imperative our industry works collectively to evolve to a consumer-centric, cross channel and platform measurement solution, that can be used universally as a future trading currency and benchmark for the efficiency and effectiveness of all brand communications efforts.”

Programmatic is projected to be another hot growth area for agencies and as media converges, it is accelerating adoption of this advertising format. As Hayley Diamond, EVP, US Digital Investment and Partnerships, Publicis Medi, noted, “Two factors are driving new investment behavior in the TV space: increased buying automation and utilizing data for enhanced targeting. We see increased programmatic interest and activity, directly driven by a need to drive efficiency, the higher volume of options in terms of supply and investment options, and the unique dynamics of 2020 and into 2021.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted what has always been an important issue among agencies – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. There can be no more delay in implementing policies and actions that foster substantive change in this area. “This has to be a key objective for our industry, it’s not ok to sit on the side-lines and hope someone else will do it. As leaders of businesses we have to be better educated in recognizing that we don’t know what we don’t know, learning more and learning how to actively make those opportunities available to all,” warned Stephanie Marks, Managing Director, Havas U.

A major area of change that might lead to a new normal for viewership is streaming which is now 25% of total video consumption, fostering further fragmentation. Agencies realize that Unification is necessary for the healthy future of television that can be bought at scale more holistically.

“OTT and CTV’s scale and maturity have placed it on an even playing field with linear TV in terms of quality and engagement and offers incremental audiences via advanced targeting capabilities. Holistic planning across all flavors of TV will be key to take full advantage of these platforms so that marketers can maximize unduplicated reach and use the strengths of each platform to deliver the right advertising message,” stated Marissa Jimenez, President, MODI Media.

Fueling this need for convergence is Addressable which, for agencies, is the necessary next step in television’s growth and relevancy to marketers. Comcast Advertising noted that in June 2020, nine programmers began addressable trials for project OAR (Open, Addressable, Ready) and AMC was the first to join Comcast Advertising’s On Addressability in the U.S. This is expected to expand in 2021.

For Jason Han, Senior Vice President of Addressable Innovation for Matterkind, “Addressable TV is taking significant steps in its evolution as programmers are opening up their national inventory and new solutions are being tested. 2021 promises to unlock new levels of scale for advertisers looking to reach specific desired audiences in a premium environment that clients value.”

Will 2021 hearken in a “new normal” for our business? There is every indication that the seeds planted in 2020 from measurement to addressability to programmatic to inclusion will blossom into a stronger, more viable media ecosystem that is, indeed, a new, robust normal.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

The Audience is Everything. Nielsen Announces Nielsen One Cross-Media Solution

We are fortunate to be involved in the time of the great expansion of media. But with this great expansion comes measurement challenges and Nielsen has been grappling with how to calculate cross platform behavior so that it can be an independent measurement on a single platform. 

Their solution is the recently launched Nielsen One which is, according to David Kenny, Nielsen’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Diversity Officer, “a single cross-media solution to drive comparable and comprehensive metrics across all platforms.”

Nielsen One is Announced

“What started out as just television and movies has now grown into a multi-platform cross media landscape, bigger than anyone ever anticipated,” explained Kenny. “Consumers are no longer limited to engaging with video content at as particular time and place. They now have endless options for viewing whatever and whenever they want to.” The endless choice of platforms, devices, mediums and ad formats coupled with an increased commitment to privacy has led to a wealth of data from a range of sources that can often be duplicative. Nielsen One aims to solve for all of these exigencies. “With Nielsen’s cross-media solution, Nielsen One,” he asserted, “we are aiming to provide marketers, advertisers and publishers with a single metric, across digital and linear that is trusted, independent and standardized across the industry.”

In mapping out Nielsen One’s complete roll-out by 2024, Nielsen’s Chief Operating Officer, Karthik Rao, explained that while the industry is at a major inflection point with innovation, it has been accelerated by Covid. “The amount of disruption and innovation that we have experienced in the past nine months would normally happen over the course of a few years,” he noted. Between the fifteen new streaming services launched in the course of two years to the +33% increase in spend for addressable in one year and the push to full distribution of smart TVs where nearly 8 out of 10 homes have a least one, the industry’s expansion is taking place on many levels. Add to that is an increased focus on, “privacy restrictions, increased consumer awareness and regulatory changes. Digital ad tech, measurement, activation will be reborn in a world without reliable  persistent identifiers such as cookies  and mobile ad ids and there is a massive shift to streaming while  the walled garden walls are growing higher and the open web remains a question mark. These changes intensify the need for standard measurement and audience de-duplication,” he concluded.

Nielsen has already made great progress in cross-media measurement and this effort, through Nielsen One, is expected to ramp up over the next two years. “We are already evolving the national currency to include  addressable measurement in the first half of 2021,” Rao noted, “We are leveraging our own ACR data and announced the integration of data from Direct TV, Dish and Vizio’s Project OAR. Starting in late 2021, for live television, we will be previewing sub-minute ads and content metrics… In 2022 we will fully launch the cross-media product and expect the market to fully transition by the fall 2024 season.”

And The Industry Responds

For Luis di Como, Executive Vice President Global Media, Unilever, the need for a single cross-media solution is paramount. “One of the biggest advantages we have at Unilever is our coverage,” he explained, “If you see thought the lens of geography, portfolio and channels, we have millions of data points and signals that we can use to understand the future,” in a global marketplace. Today, Unilever boasts a People Data Center. “This is the place where we capture, store, analyze and leverage all of the data that we have from first party data to second and third party to get a holistic view of the consumer and to get unique insights,” he stated and added, “Covid accelerated that trend,” moving the markets from ecommerce to “e-everything,” creating that much more data to handle and changing consumer behaviors. One single measurement will enable companies like Unilever to mitigate waste and manage frequency resulting in optimizing company efforts and creating a better consumer experience.

Many companies have been working independently to find cross-media solutions. How can we best combine our efforts to get to an industry standard solution?  Michael Kassan, Founder Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Medialink, moderated a panel of executives from across the media industry. “We have made progress in the last year but … we need to move faster, marketers are getting frustrated, digital continues to grow,” he stated. Moving into 2021 and beyond, Kassan posited four major questions – How do we increase user engagement in advertising? How can we create new, more non-interruptive experiences that would be preferred by consumers and work for marketers? How do we make it easier for marketers to connect to the audiences that move their brand? How do we insure your messages are in front of the right viewer?

For Kirk McDonald, North America Chief Executive Officer, GroupM, “the challenges facing the industry will require us to work together and be more cooperative to make the industry function better,” and move towards single sources of measurement for video across all distribution platforms.

With an extremely diversified portfolio, Linda Yaccarino, Chairman Global Advertising and Partnerships, NBCU, believes that since the pandemic, “strategic priorities have changed dramatically. Did we anticipate, unfortunately the theme parks being largely closed down? Did we anticipate the studio business being what it is today? But additionally, did we anticipate the broadband business having extraordinary and meteoric growth with no anticipation of that slowing down?” Broadband, aggregation and streaming are now the new priorities to, “put the consumer at the core.” She added, that as the industry comes together with, “a common purpose for an open platform that is dedicated to safety and transparency, we can really make strides and get ahead to meet the consumer needs.”

Having worked on both the client and agency side, Ben Jankowski, Group Head of Global Media, Mastercard, has been quoted as saying, “The biggest decision we have to make as marketers is where we put our money.” This is a challenge that is not yet being solved by today’s measurement. “Today we can’t measure the holistic view of the consumer. Today, with the research challenge we have and the business realities of people in the marketplace who have built products that are not conducive to being comparable, we have fragmentation which is more difficult to measure than any time before. We have to get in front of it,” he admonished.

Tara Walpert Levy, Managing Director of Global Ads Marketing, Google, noted, “The viewer is all that matters. They define what television is. If you are a buyer, it is critical to have objective, comparable, independent measurement which buyers and sellers both have confidence in and that lets you operate at scale.”  For her, Nielsen One will make this process easier and impactful.

Kenny explained that Nielsen is hyper focused on solving this industry challenge. “Nielsen has been part of the challenge,” he admitted, “We have tried to measure everything historically in different methodologies so there was a digital ad rating, TV ad rating, cable rating. When I got here two years ago we did a complete overhaul to get to one id platform and the one ability to measure all of it in the same de-duplicated way. It is the only way we can solve this problem.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

Three Views About the Global Advertising Market. An ARF Virtual Town Hall

For those of us in the media industry, these days of coronavirus uncertainties in personal health and finances also include concerns about the future of the media business, specifically the impact of the pandemic on advertising revenue. The ARF has been offering Virtual Town Halls on the subject with the most recent one on Global Advertising held on March 26. What are the long term impacts and best practices that we can adopt to plan for the future? 

Hosted by ARF President and CEO, Scott McDonald this Town Hall polled three industry experts on the subject – Laura Martin, Entertainment and Media Analyst, Needham & Co, Brian Wieser, Global President Business Intelligence, GroupM and Christian Polman, Chief Strategy Officer, Ebiquity.

A Look at the Market by Laura Martin

Challenges in Predicting - For Laura Martin, past predictions of the market were not prescient. Back in December 2019, both Zenith and WPP were predicting global ad spend increases of over 4% year to year. But by April, she anticipates that huge losses will result in the GDP cratering as unemployment claims skyrocket. “Economies are shutting down,” she stated and noted that it is not easy for professional forecasters look ahead with any certainty regarding GDP. Challenges abound. First they must be able to predict when the infection rate will peak in every country. Then, after peaking, they need to see how long it will take for consumer demand to return. Following that, they would need to know what percentage of small businesses will fail before consumer demand returns. “Because small businesses are a large part of overall advertising,” she explained.

But the U.S. is in Better Shape than Other Countries - Martin uses the stock market as a predictive indicator and currently, with its huge declines and high volatility, “the market is telling you (to expect) a negative $6 trillion forecast. But how much of that decline is (consumer) sentiment and how much of it is actual fundamental deterioration?” But there is cause for some optimism, even if only relative to other countries. The U.S. stock market represents 44% of the market capitalization of the world, 20% of all listed companies and has more highly valued companies on average. This means that the U.S. is better prepared to become more dominant over time compared to the rest of the world, “because the rest of world businesses are all a third the size.” So while we may be worried about small businesses in the U.S., “the rest of the world is actually in worse shape.” Another factor in our favor is that the U.S. is more productive than most other economies. But now may not be the time to buy, she warned. We don’t know how long it will take for the virus to dissipate and consumer sentiment is currently “anti-exuberance,” meaning depressed and cautious.

Uneven Impact on Global Advertising – Martin used the Travel category as an example of how the global advertising market could be negatively impacted. Travel and Hospitality, which has effectively shut down, was projected to edge out CPG in 2020 as the fifth largest digital advertising category representing 8.6% of ad spend. Because half of all Travel spending is on digital media, Martin posited that the impact from Travel advertising shutting down is three times worse on digital than it is on offline media. Further, Google Search represents 70% of Travel digital ad spend. The takeaway is that,” when travel silos turn off, different media is affected in different ways.” In addition, she noted that because 50-70% of TV inventory is bought in the prior May and is contractually obligated, TV is in better shape than digital (which is bought in scatter and by auction and can be cancelled immediately) to withstand market volatility.

A Cause for Optimism by Brian Wieser

Optimism with a Caveat - Brian Wieser is seeing some hope for optimism in the virus trends. He has been monitoring China where the latest reports show a slowing of the spread. “China has turned a corner,” he explained, it is, “a baseline to think about how this plays out in different countries.” But, he noted, there are three different kinds of countries and each type needs to be taken into account when projecting the impact on global ad spending. For Wieser, countries divide into, “those who were hit with the crisis and immediately took appropriate aggressive steps to address the matter, among those Japan, Singapore and South Korea. There are those countries that messed up for a month and then took aggressive steps and China is probably the best example. And then there are countries that messed up for a month. Messed up for another month and are hopefully taking the right steps. Italy is pretty clearly in that category. It remains to be seen how exactly different countries will follow.”

Small Businesses Have Severe Risks - However, Wieser believes that small businesses are the most immediately impacted and often “have the fewest resources to see them through a crisis such as this one with a limited ability to tap into the financial systems” for help. Unfortunately, “a lot of the support we’ve seen to date has not been focused on those companies and this is where the most severe risks are. Small businesses are being hit first and fast.” Lessons from the past financial crisis are not always the same lessons for today. Countries with a solid safety net provide some relief for small businesses but this not ubiquitous worldwide.

Supply Chain Considerations – Because China is getting back to business, Wieser is less concerned about and lost output that could disrupt the supply  chain, which at the time of the initial outbreak, seemed inevitable. But, “the bigger threat is that other countries around the world don’t take the right actions and then become the risk for China if demand doesn’t reemerge. The bigger point is that we can actually make this worse.” Specific public policies and actions by citizens and by individual countries will drive much of the outcome which at this point is an unknown.

What Should Brands Do? – In this time of uncertainty, brands should focus on ways to stay relevant and be helpful to consumers. Some companies are pivoting in ways that change their business in socially positive ways. Take, for example, “companies with alcohol products are finding ways to convert their production lines to hand sanitizer manufacturing. Anyone with a capacity to produce heavy metal based hardware can produce ventilators,” he explained. “But even brands that have nothing to do with the physical needs of emergency professionals  are finding ways to be helpful,” by altering their creative messaging such as C  O  C  A  C  O   L   A to encourage social distancing.

A Pragmatic View By Christian Polman

No Surprise - Any pandemic outbreak shouldn’t come as a surprise because, Polman asserted, if you go into the archives, policy health experts have been talking about this for a long time. A perfect storm has been created, he suggested, by Poor Planetary Health which risks the spread of infection, an Interconnected Global Supply Chain that is unsustainable, particularly the food supply chain, the rise of Nationalism and Unilateralism, “coming into mainstream politics which divides populations at a time when we need cooperation” and the Low Levels of Trust in Institutions, “which is getting worse and worse, at a time when trusted information is critical to inform the public and to guide policy making.”  

Long Term and Short Term – Polman believes that a long term need is finding a sustainable food chain, “and one that needs to be affordable.” In the short term, pressing needs include, “having a vaccine, a preventative treatment as well as long term testing.” He noted that, “consumer confidence is key here.” But this will be problematic as the latest studies show that confidence is in free fall. Yet the long term trend for GDP growth and ad expenditures, “is yo yo’d over a long period of time and quite consistently over the economic cycles. The rule of thumb is to expect a downturn every ten years. We were due one but I don’t think anyone foresaw how this one would be happening.”  But, he added, we always bounce back so those who can afford it should start to plan for the recovery.

Success Factors – The reasons for this economic downturn are different from previous ones. Brand Relevance has never mattered as much as now. Take for example hand sanitizers which are, according to Polman, counter-cyclical. But, “Media is a more normal example,” he stated. “Media consumption has been going up dramatically as it typically does in a down cycle as a function of more people who are unemployed. In this case, people unemployed and people stuck at home.” Agility is another success factor where making decisions fast is a big differentiator. Risk Taking is another; “It’s not just making decisions quickly but being able to take risks to take advantage of any opportunities,” he added. Long Term Orientation, “matters a lot. The companies that are long term oriented are the ones that are going to win.” And, “Consumer Trust has never mattered more. It will be critical,” he added.  He advised that brands, depending on the category, should maintain their market share of voice, “which you can do even with a lower budget…  It could take three years for brands to see the full impact of their investment. That’s why it’s such a key long term game.”

In a parting word of advice, Polman offered the following, “Every one of us has a role to play when it comes to leading and driving corporations. A lasting message from all of this is in any crisis, the rate of change will accelerate.” I wonder, can we handle any greater rate of change?

 This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.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

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