An Eye Towards the Future of Multi-Measurement. The NBCOne Developer Conference

While some in the press called the recent NBCOne Developer Conference “nerdy” it was, in fact, fascinating. The purpose of this 2^nd annual meeting was twofold.  First was to announce the many new innovations that NBC has added to their One-Platform. Second was a call to action on the part of the industry to foster more collaboration between vendors, programmers, marketers and overall competitors to accelerate the advancement of measurement and implement and adopt alternative currencies. 

One panel which highlighted the recent announcement of a long awaited JIC (Joint Industry Committee), summed up the importance of working together as an industry, crossing self-interested lines for the greater good. The goal is to establish a mutually acceptable audience measurement for both the buy and sell side of the industry.

Also presented at the conference were panelists who spoke about the value and efficacy of NBCU’s One Platform, how is it best used across departments and disciplines. NBCU’s Linda Yaccarino, Chairman Global Advertising and Partnerships, noted that when it comes to Big Media and Big Tech, it is important to have both because of the need for data unification and content in one platform. Therefore a JIC is vital to facilitate the breakdown of data silos for a mutually acceptable range of measurements to that position companies to maximize their value.  This requires us to move away from single solutions, move away from simply counting impressions and a move to a multi-currency future (which, incidentally, is available now).

Other highlights included an interview with Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak by CNBC’s journalist, Carl Quintanilla, on the future of AI where, according to Wozniak, computers are not meant to replace humans but to help them and that the path to success will be filled with errors and missteps.

According to Ryan McConville, EVP Advertising Platforms & Operations, NBCU, new and improved features of One Platform include the ability to activate on multi-currencies through iSpot and VideoAmp that optimize within the life of a campaign.  He also announced a partnership with Mediaocean that enables end-to-end capabilities for transactions which facilitates scaling.

John Lee, NBCU’s Chief Data officer announced that NBC Unified is now ready for targeting and measuring.  Notably, the use of data from trusted first party sources (their advertisers) can now be matched with NBC IDs that include data from content, their fans passions and even theme parks. There are new advertiser segments for measurement that match to real outcomes.

Deborah Wahl CMO GM presented a use case for NBC showcasing how the Platform was used to identify consumers for their electric cars last year and how it will be used this year for launching EVs in all classes from luxury (Cadillac) to mainstream (Chevy).   

Andy Cohen, Host and Executive Producer for Bravo, talked about the success of Fandom and used Bravo as an example with BravoCon while NBCU’s Global CMO, Josh Feldman spoke about eCommerce and Retail Media. Feldman announced the debut of One Platform Commerce partnerships with retail media Citris Ad and NBC Checkout which enables seamless purchase capabilities in partnership with Kerv Interactive. There is also Tech licensing for commerce technology which is a new business opportunity for NBCU.

NBCU’s EVP Measurement & Impact, Advertising & Partnerships, Kelly Abcarian, championed “let there be change” facilitated with iSpot and VideoAmp.  She also predicted that currencies in use today such as C3 and C7 will be out of date by 2024. Notably, NBCU has now “certified” 29 new partners and 5 different measurement categories. 

For those of us who have seen the advancement of technology and data with a sense of excitement, these developments and predictions and the expansion of systems such as NBCU’s One Platform, bode well for an industry that needs to keep up with change. As David Levy, Co-CEO and equity partner in Horizon Sports noted, maybe we are approaching a measurement renaissance.

 

 First published in www.MediaVillage.com Thought Leaders   

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

TV Audience Measurement: Takeaways from ARF’s AudiencexScience 2018

The annual Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) AudiencexScience conference is a must-attend for anyone in the media, research, data, and advertising industries, and especially those interested in TV audience measurement. This year, the agenda was stacked—industry players covered the transition of short-form ads from digital-only platforms to TV, as well as issues of privacy, especially in the wake of the recent GDPR legislation—but here, we’re going to focus on cross-platform measurement strides and challenges.

Arguably one of the most vexing problems in standardizing cross-platform measurement is the lack of consensus on what the metrics and edit rules should be. Should the industry retain age and gender as the basic metric? And, if so, how does that reconcile across platforms?
Chris Squire, senior director of product management at Samba TV, explained that “a digital impression doesn’t mean the same thing as TV-based impressions. There needs to be distinct frequency reporting and a common definition for impressions,” to then be able to measure across platforms, he said.

Yet, maybe impressions no longer apply. Linda Yaccarino, chairman of advertising and client partnerships at NBCUniversal, believes the time has come to challenge age/gender legacy metrics. “We are in the outcomes business. All bets are off as it relates to legacy,” she stated. “If anyone can get it right it should be Nielsen,” she added, but it may not be one single commonly accepted measurement. “The days of a single currency proving impact is not the way the industry is going to go,” she concluded. For ARF CEO and President Scott McDonald, “the real currency is attention and emotion.” But how do we best measure that?

Read the full article at the Videa blog.

Optimism in the Face of Dramatic Change. ARF AUDIENCExSCIENCE Conference

For those of us who work in the media measurement space, the annual ARF measurement conference has always been a must-attend.  This year, topics ranged from the standardization of cross platform metrics, ad length, attribution, privacy and the uses of new technology like artificial intelligence to facilitate data insights. 

My impression is that measurement evolution is finally gaining traction with more collaboration between competing companies (Think: OpenAP), more efforts to create new standardized metrics and data labeling (CIMM and the IAB) and the end of business-as-usual constraints (ad lengths that vary from 6 seconds plus).

Three Big Trends

According to Scott McDonald, President and CEO, ARF, there are three major trends advancing in the industry. The first is “making progress with cross-platform audience measurement that is keeping up with technology and consumers—and if not, what the impediments are and how we can up our game.”

The second trend is breaking out of ad length constraints so as to more fully leverage platform and device viewing behaviors. The implementation of short-form ads, some as short as six seconds, is one possible solution. “But there are still questions around their effectiveness, how to best deploy them, and how they may affect the consumer’s frustration with ad clutter,” McDonald averred.

The third trend concerns privacy. “Marketing has been in a headlong race toward ever more precise targeting, fueled by the rise of big data, data analytics, and multi-touch attribution,” he noted. “Now, however, targeting is a risk with signs of consumer mistrust in how data is being used (from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its follow-on effects), and the continued impact of the rollout of GDPR, an EU law with global implications.” 

However, McDonald cannot predict how the concern over privacy will unfold, how it could impact the media ecosystem, or whether there will be regulatory restrictions on data-driven targeting. “The industry has to evaluate whether it has gone too far in its zeal for targeting – so much so as to diminish advertising ROI and damage relations with consumers,” he concluded.

Changing the Current Metrics to Better Measure Cross Platform

There are those who believe that it is time to find a new standard metric for media that goes beyond age and gender. There is so much useful data out there that can craft a more nuanced and targeted audience measurement that we only need to come together as an industry and craft a more appropriate cross platform metric. But, in reality, it is not that easy. 

For some, Nielsen is and will be the standard. Dave Morgan, CEO Simulmedia, believes that, “Nielsen will be the gold standard of TV measurement well into the future.” But, he expects an evolution with, “core panel ratings enhanced with much more granular measurements that capture much deeper characteristics of audiences reached at the person/impression level and also real attribution to the delivery of desired business outcomes.” He added that we are already seeing some of this enhanced measurement in the marketplace and he expects to see it become a very significant part of the measurement mix by the end of 2020.

For others, the reason why the industry moves slowly is that there are different crediting qualifiers for the same measurements on different platforms. Consensus on which rules should be used for all platforms is an important next step. Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer, comScore explained that for Live TV/DVR/TV VOD and OOH, credit for the full minute is given based off of who has the plurality of seconds in a given minute. Linear Mobile and Computer has a 30-second qualifier where credit is given only after a full 30 seconds of viewing has occurred. Dynamic Mobile and Computer currently has no qualifier but the MRC standard is 2 seconds with 50% of the ad viewable. How can these be reconciled and equated?

Consumers Continue to Rule

“We’re seeing a huge shift in viewing habits,” said Dan Robbins, Roku’s head of ad research. “Recent research of our cord cutting users shows that 78 percent think cable is too expensive, 57 percent believe there are too many channels, while 80 percent still watch as much TV as they did before they cut the cord. Streaming has become mainstream.”

But Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Advertising and Client Partnerships, NBCUniversal, believes in the power of television because it offers premium content that is an unbeatable draw for audiences and advertisers. All of this talk about the power of digital is a false narrative, she posited. When advertisers are enticed by cheap CPMs for lower quality content, they fail to understand “the relative value of content they are getting.”

Maybe it’s all semantics. For Megan Clarken, President, Watch, Nielsen, it is all video no matter what device is being used. She explained that “from a measurement perspective, our job is to find comparable measurement across video,” placing TV as “part of the digital industry.”

Conclusion

Despite the continuing upheaval and viewer erosion on certain platforms, “I am extremely optimistic about the future,” Yaccarino stated, and added, “We need to challenge legacy. It is impacting all of our businesses all around. Why are we afraid of change? We have permission to change.” Change is certainly in the air. Now it is time to take a big breath and move decisively forward.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

NBCU’s Linda Yaccarino is a Strong Advocate of Advanced Advertising … and Data

B&C MultiChannel’s Advanced Advertising conference offered, as usual, an array of fascinating and provocative opinions in the advanced advertising space. The October 20, 2015 conference started with a keynote by Linda Yaccarino Chairman, Advertising Sales and Client Partnerships, NBCUniversal who leads a department that is embracing data driven solutions.

According to Yaccarino, Advanced Advertising is “changing the industry in a very dramatic way especially in premium video. We are getting better at developing data products that describe the power of video and it is changing television greatly. Advertisers don't have to make the decision between data driven marketing via data companies and the power of TV. The pendulum is swinging back to premium video. It is all about data driven products.” 

She is convinced that advertisers will pay more. “At NBCU we have a huge suite of data products and we did well as advertisers invested across the NBCU portfolio. With our new platform, NBCUX programmatic, we are out of capacity. The more we power with inventory and data, the more demand there is. In fact, more demand than supply at this time.” But when asked how much business she actually conducts programmatically, she explained, “We do over 10 million in ad revenue which is small in comparison to all of NBCU but if you talk about capacity and demand, we are placing a lot of resources against it and the growth has been exponential.”

Being at NBCU, which is owned by Comcast, is an advantage for Yaccarino especially in the set top box data access. She reveals that “Comcast set top box data reaches 22 to 25 million homes and powers our data tools - specifically our audience targeting platform. There is an unprecedented amount of data available which can be a surrogate to national. This is something that we can use to really target ads across all of the NBCU properties. What we know compared to other folks is the power to utilize set top box data to actually service and support the entire TV ecosystem.”

The current measurement system has its limitations. She says, “It is good for us all to improve content measurement and improve television measurement overall. It has to get better. Between 15% and 30% of all TV viewing is unmeasured on OTT and mobile so we have to be able to measure viewing wherever and whatever the screen is.” But, she cautions, “It is not about liking or not liking the way things are measured now. It is a situation that must be fixed. How do we come together as an industry to better measure our product. It has to be more intuitive and we’ve got to get to a place with a uniform currency. That is a good thing about Nielsen. They have decades of experience but they are largely self-reported. We need to come together and coalesce as an industry. Advertisers want eyeballs that connect contextually.”

When asked, what keeps her up at night, she responded, “Measurement. It runs the gamut from how do we get better to how do we prove 30% of the audience is missing. And we need to move quickly enough. We will continue working with Nielsen but also need other partners to prove behavioral metrics with advertisers.” And this is not a fast solution, “How do you take the super tanker of a company like NBCU and move it quickly enough to get advertisers what they need.”