CIMM Cross-Platform Media Measurement and Data Summit

Fostering innovation in cross platform media measurement and bringing more granular measurement to TV have been missions for CIMM since its inception. Now, at the seventh annual Cross-Platform Media Measurement and Data Summit held last week in New York, CIMM is proving that hard work and deep analysis can result in industry change. Panelists from networks, agencies, brands, associations and data companies exchanged ideas on how the advancements in cross-platform measurement and data are impacting the industry ad model. 

CIMM has created a Measurement Manifesto which serves as a roadmap to ensure a continued industry focus on cross-platform measurement. As Jane Clarke, CEO and Managing Director of CIMM, noted, “We need to keep the dialogue going about how to manage change by following our roadmap to plan, measure exposure and evaluate. There is still more work to do but we are making progress.”

Highlights of the seventh annual summit include:

The Erosion of the Advertising Market and Upending of Business as Usual

According to Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Growth Officer, Publicis Groupe, the advertising industry is in for a rude awakening. He said that the increasing ad loads and irrelevant messaging has been disrespectful to the consumers’ time. The result is that they are increasingly spending more time in ad free environments. Because of this trend, there will be “less and less advertising,” resulting in a 25% to 30% decline in ad inventory in the next five years as brands go direct to the consumer.There will also be consolidation among media companies resulting in fewer networks and,therefore, less inventory.

There are three Connected Ages, according to Tobaccowala. The first was the Link, the second was the advent of Social Networks and Smartphones and the third is now Connecting to Data with Artificial Intelligence. “Things are connecting to things with the IoT,” he stated. “There will be new ways of connecting through Voice, AR and VR which are coming to us much faster than anticipated and will lead to different ways to measure,” he added. While we are in the business of measuring impressions from programs or networks now, this will shift to measuring interactions of people.

Going For Good Rather Than Perfect in Attribution

Attribution is emerging as a primary goal for advertisers and networks. But there are so many aspects to attribution that achieving the perfect industry standard is a chimera. “There is the lie of attribution,” noted Joe Marchese, President Advertising Revenue, Fox Networks Group because “the human brain is more complicated. Brands are bought with cultural relevance.” There is also, what Scott Hagedorn, CEO, Hearts & Science, Omnicom Media Group, described as “negative attribution,” where an ad placed next to objectionable content becomes tainted. And it is important to give credit where credit is due. Brand value is accrued over the long term according to Marchese, so “if we move to pure attribution, it is the platforms that achieve all of the value.”

Overcoming Obstacles

Industry associations such as the ANA, 4As, ARF and MRC are all focused on addressing a range of industry challenges including solving for fraud, viewability, deduplication and data labeling for cross platform measurement. 

Bob Liodice, CEO, ANA, noted that his organization has made progress in the fraud area and in eliminating waste. “We are learning how to control fraud and rein in bots,” he stated. “It is increasingly complex but we are all asking the same question - Do I have the information necessary to make right decisions to grow business?” Scott McDonald, CEO and President, the ARF, spoke of the Sunshine Rule advocating transparency in measuring exposures through deduplication. “There is a gap between exposure and ROI sales lift and it is not well understood,” he stated. 

Cooperation Between Frenemies

“Fostering competition is the only way to get innovation,” stated Clarke. This is true in the area of measurement. Brain Hughes, SVP, Audience Intelligence and Strategy, MAGNA, believes that competition between measurement companies “makes for better thinking for problem solving and that  is not a bad thing.”

Yet there are some companies that are finding that cooperating with their competitors can bear fruit. OpenAP, a collaborative effort between Fox, Turner and Viacom is one effort designed to measure attention and engagement. “We need to get better thinking about how measurement correlates to outcomes. What viewability drives outcome and then build back to measurement standards from there,” advised Howard Shimmel, Chief Research Officer, Turner.

“Measurement is now a team sport. Cooperation is needed,” concluded Elissa Lee, Director Research, Advanced Technologies, Google.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

OpenAP Unveiled

It takes some doing to keep a secret like this. For close to one year, Viacom, Turner and Fox have been working together to build a three-corporation consortium for accepting third and first party datasets for use as guidance in the sales marketplace. They announced their joint effort this past week in New York City to an audience of advertisers, clients, suppliers and press.

OpenAP Announcement

“This is a historical day for all, of us,” announced Donna Speciale, President Turner Ad Sales. “We three (Turner, Viacom and Fox) are all here together. It has been a year in the making.” And referring to the high level agency executives in the crowd, she added, “We came together because of all of you. You were the catalyst, asking us to get together to unify and make data more scalable. We listened and are making it happen.”

The OpenAp was designed to address the many concerns in the media marketplace regarding data. “Despite all of the value that data provides, we still hear same concerns and that is that it is complicated, not scalable, there is a lack of auditing and it is not consistent. We needed to simplify audience targeting. It sounds simple but it is not an easy task,” noted Speciale.

What is also not an easy task is bringing together and coordinating the efforts of three highly competitive corporations and keeping these efforts under wraps for so long. “It’s crazy that we could keep it quiet,” stated Sean Moran, Head of Sales, VIACOM Media Networks.

OpenAP Interface

For those of us working with data, OpenAp is a tremendous step forward in beginning to address some of the challenges in the media marketplace from walled gardens, to scalability and accreditation.

Bryson Gordon, EVP Data Strategy, Viacom, explained that OpenAP has two separate pathways to access the audience data and see how the contract is posting. The first pathway is a website. “If you work for an agency or an advertiser, you will have a login to this website,” he explained, “Through that website you will be able to explore advanced audience and onboard your own advanced audiences and you will be able to pull down the post from the campaign across inventory from Fox, Viacom and Turner and any other member publisher that has joined.” The second pathway offers a way to onboard custom datasets that might be proprietary to the agency or advertiser. “We recognize that agencies and advertisers have made huge investments in defining audiences in proprietary data systems, through DMPs. So it is critical that we make it easy and seamless for you to have clean pathways into and out of OpenAP,” Gordon added.

OpenAP Details

OpenAP address some of the marketplace challenges. With normalization, scalability and accreditation, the consortium hired Accenture to manage those tasks. “Accenture is doing the build and the auditing of the measurement,” according to Joe Marchese, President of Advanced Advertising Products, Fox Network. Notably, Accenture is the company who jumped in to fix the Affordable Care website after it first crashed and now handles many of the health exchanges across the country. They are adept at managing vast amounts of data, normalizing it and keeping the data quality consistent and high. 

When it comes to the data sets, “We are data agnostic,” explained, Gordon, “At the end of the day, OpenAP is about supporting all the datasets that advertisers need to create the high value segments they want to target.” To start, OpenAP is working with two major data source ecosystems – “comScore for all of the set top box data and the associated third party syndicated datasets that they have,” he added, and “Nielsen as a key part of this initiative.”  In a press release that came directly after the OpenAP announcement, Lynda Clarizio, Nielsen’s President of U.S. Media, stated, “We support the consortium’s ambitions to create a clearinghouse for audience-based buying on linear television. We look forward to working with the participating networks and advertisers on the broader success of this initiative.”

When it comes to consistency, Gordon said, “Consistency is about have the same segments for all publishers making it easy to activate at scale. You can go find an advanced audience, have it consistently defined, have it activated across most of television in premium content that is absolutely brand safe. It’s about on-boarding once and activing again and again.”

Working Together for a Common Cause

How can you get three major competing corporations to work together for a common cause? “We all experienced a very similar pain, in talking to our agencies and clients who were all buying Fox, Turner and Viacom,” said Michael Strober, EVP Client Strategy and Ad Innovation, Turner and co-head of Turner Ignite, who added, ”How do we make it easier to buy and transact on a larger scale? We had open and honest conversations – are you experiencing the same thing? We met with Kern Schireson, Chief Data Officer, Viacom. I sat with Joe Marchese. We decided that nobody is going to do this for us. We needed to find the solution and do it ourselves. It was very organic and a response to the market.”

This is a big first step for OpenAP. As Marchese noted, “This is step one - live linear television. What comes next are dynamic advertising and VOD environments.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com