Taking the MRC into the Future. An Interview with George Ivie

When you think of a Good Housekeeping seal in the media industry, one immediately thinks of MRC accreditation. There is arguably no greater source of expertise in evaluating metrics and analytics for use in media measurement. Leading that effort is the MRC’s CEO, George Ivie who has recently renewed his contract with the organization for another five years.

Charlene Weisler: When did you start at the MRC and what are your greatest accomplishments so far?

George Ivie: I started as MRC CEO, Executive Director on January 1, 2000 but all told, I’ve been working with MRC as an auditor and in MRC leadership since the early 1980s.

Probably my most significant accomplishment is to move the MRC into a focus on digital measurement and digitalization, first through development of expertise within our organization, but later through development of standards and follow-through with audits and validation work at dozens of measurement services.  The group of standards MRC has promulgated, such as measurement of digital impressions, viewable impressions, clicks, invalid traffic and fraud filtration, digital audience measurement, ad verification, location measurement, content-level brand safety, cross-media measurement and the latest additions (some in finalization processes) of SSAI, CTV, in-game, digital place based and the totality of out-of-home measurement as well as outcome measurement, have collectively added structure, terminology, disclosure requirements and best practice guidance that in some cases the entire world is using.  This has been a very significant accomplishment for me as CEO, but really attributable to the Staff of the MRC as well as our membership leaders.

Notably, this body of work has impacted all measurement organizations, not just those that one would think of as “digital” measurement organizations or platforms.  Digitalization, data quality and machine learning, modeling and modeling bias, etc. are areas that impact almost all of our audited enterprises whether they are legacy measurers, digital measurers, ad verification, digital platforms, etc.

Other accomplishments include: (1) greatly expanding number and diversity of both the MRC membership and the audits we conduct, (2) re-establishing the recognition of our industry self-regulatory role with the US Government as well as updating our status with the US Department of Justice, and (3) continuing to improve on the recognition of the neutrality, expertise, reputation and influence of MRC within the US and abroad.

Weisler: What do you hope to accomplish in the next two years?

Ivie: We have a full list. Bring accreditation back to television measurement among available measurers, considering new techniques evolving to capture all audience usage as well as improving the stability of measurements. Move forward and build audits and general industry compliance for the SSAI, CTV and in-game guidance we have produced.  Establish an entirely new area of accreditation centered on outcome measurement — specifically: outcome metrics, transparency, attribution and data quality. Continue to make progress on digital platforms audits with the penetration of our audits among the platforms and our four audit goals of impressions, IVT, audience measurement and brand safety (soon adding outcomes metrics). Consider privacy and privacy driven changes across our measurement standards and audits. Finally, ensure the marketplace continues to view representation of all types of Americans within research as a critical quality attribute.

Weisler: What are the biggest challenges to the media industry and how can the MRC address them?

Ivie: We will focus on assimilating consumer changes, measurement methods changes and technology changes while considering the importance of these changes, and properly valuing those in the context of measurement and commerce. We will also be assessing new (or newly prominent) entrants in the measurement space and bringing the light of MRC’s independent 3rd party audit and validation process to those services as the marketplace begins to place reliance on them. We will be adjusting measurement to reflect privacy requirements, maintaining fair and representative measurement and bringing outcomes into validation, auditing and accreditation, giving the increasing prominence outcomes in evaluation of advertising.

Weisler: What are the biggest opportunities in media and how can the MRC facilitate them?

Ivie: The critical big-picture areas include aligning our industry’s work with important consumer preferences, ensuring research is consumer centric, complete and representative. We also strive to keep measurement transparent and validated while being responsive to necessary changes like the increasing granularity of data needs, etc. We also want to promote cross-media measurement and views of the consumer while being privacy safe and compliant.

Weisler:  What are the biggest challenges and opportunities specifically for the MRC?

Ivie: One of our biggest challenges is keeping up with expertise requirements, new technologies and maintaining our relevance among newer practitioners who may not be aware of the history and significance of our role in the industry as well as the education of our members and outsiders about various critical research changes and evolution.

Weisler: What will the media landscape look like 5 years from now from the MRC's perspective?

Ivie: I project that outcome measurements will become increasingly prominent. I also see continued growth in CTV, Apps and other enhanced content delivery methods that are consumer tailorable. There might also be a more complex media measurement environment with numerous providers with perhaps a small number of larger cross-media measurers as a back-bone. Finally I see a fuller realization of identity and first-party data growing sources of value in measurement, increasing levels of data-source to measurer integrations through APIs and the growth of clean-room environments.

 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

Measurement in an Age of Data and Fragmentation

Obviously cross platform measurement in all of its forms is a hot topic now as the de-accreditation of Nielsen’s local and national TV measurement services by the MRC along with a highly fragmented media environment creates uncertainty and challenge.

I was curious as to what the industry as a whole was thinking on the subject and reached out to the Research Wonks, a forum for those involved in media and advertising research, analytics and data science, last week. The response was so large that it required two articles on the subject – one appearing in this publication and the other in Mitch Oscar’s Hocus Focus newsletter.

Measurement Currency – Looking Back and Looking Forward

When they say that the past is prologue, they must be thinking of media measurement. We’ve had a measurement currency (and by currency I mean a standard metric that can be used as a comparison point between companies and platforms) since the beginning of media which has helped guide the valuation of inventory to this day. But as the industry fragments, it can leave us with a sense of uncertainty as the new solutions that best address the new environment have yet to be agreed upon.

For Jeff Boehme, Chief Executive, Executive Media Consultants, the future of measurement is as fragmented as the number of platforms. "I have observed over the past ten years the industry has evolved to create and accept multiple currencies for media planning and buying out of necessity,” he noted and added, “Going forward, successful media executions now must include metrics of performance beyond age and gender to measure outcomes defined outside traditional frameworks. I believe we will continue to embrace multiple currencies, already available through various walled gardens, but need transparency and audited standards to provide the necessary confidence for longer term use.”

Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Insights and Analysis, is concerned that we can easily go off track by focusing on the past while the future looms large. “I worry that we're distracted trying to solve for 2012 research needs- fixing linear TV currency measurement- when what we really need to be focused on is a future state integrated planning/activation/measurement research infrastructure to incorporates all video channels- linear, addressable linear, AVOD, CTV,” he warned. “Building that infrastructure is hard- requires panels, first party data from walled gardens, common target audience definitions across platform, ability to integrate RF forecasts for linear and addressable media, segmentation schema that reflects the way that media is consumed,” he added.

Media Currency – Getting to a Strong Place

There are those optimists, like Radha Subramanyam, President and Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS, who are ready for the measurement challenge. “The media measurement industry is ripe for real market transformation,” she informed, “There are now multiple providers of trusted and high-quality data measurement across video platforms, and our own data is critical as well. The measurement marketplace is undergoing massive diversification.”

Yet, the path to currency is still open to discussion. For Michael Vinson, Chief Research Officer, Comscore, the primacy of long standing panels that the industry has relied upon in the past may be up for discussion. “Recruited-sample panels can either be used as the foundational element of a measurement, or to add additional context to a measurement based on large transactional data sets,” he began. But, “When panel response/participation/cooperation rates are in the 10 to 20% range, we can no longer pretend that the panel is in any sense representative of the population. Moreover, media fragmentation puts severe pressure on the size of a panel, beyond what can be plausibly afforded. Therefore, panels should only be used to add context to currency measurements, which should instead be based on large-scale, passively-collected data sets.”

It stands to reason that the best way to formulate industry adoption of a media measurement currency is to gather interested experts together as a working group. Whether this is a consortium of industry organizations such as the MRC or something patterned along the lines of a European JIC, is up for discussion. As Andrew Brown of Andrew Brown Associates, noted, “All vendors no matter how good their data will need 3rd party verification. All players will need third party syndicated solutions to put their 1st party data in competitive context.”

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.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

Working Together to Improve Measurement. Insights from the Cynopsis Data and Measurement Conference

For anyone working in the research, data and analytics space, there is no better event than the annual Cynopsis Measurement and Data conference. It is an opportunity to dissect what is going on in the Wild West World of media data that maps the intersection of two main issues; the ever increasing availability of new datasets that expand our knowledge of consumer behavior and the legacy measurement that continues to monetize and fuel the business. At some point these two forces must merge. But how?

What is Constant and What is Evolving

There are some aspects of the media business that remain constant such as the need to agree on KPIs for a campaign, the need to form partnerships that have open communication and the need to agree on how success will be measured. But more and more, we are seeing elements of the business that are perpetually in flux such as the range of data availability, metrics and measurement analytics and  consumer behavior with device usage. For George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director, Media Ratings Council, getting a handle on measurement all boils down to data usage. The two major industry changes according to Ivie, are, “How the industry views using research data and how consumers view data usage.”

Defining outcomes are pivotal to managing change. From a technological standpoint we need to understand “how consumers are using technology. They are moving off linear and the MRC is tracking that behavior. Everything is mobile which is harder to measure and nail down,” he noted. “Consumer choice is causing tension in our business. We need to design server side ad insertion and find ways to avoid ad blocking,” he concluded.

Improve the User Experience

Solving for content navigation in a world of increasing choice would seem to be a no-brainer for the industry. Carol Hanley, Chief Revenue Officer, TV Time offers a solution. “We are a consumer facing app,” she explained, “With 13 million global users who interact around TV content. There is a need in the TV business to understand how to get content and we are like a TV Guide on steroids,” she explained. This app also captures user data such as sentiment information, social dialogue and moment by moment interactions.

Scott Levine, Senior Vice President, Product and Technology Distribution, Univision, looks at content to drive viewer satisfaction and delight. This is an ongoing process. “Our whole history as media company is about evolution and creating a closer and more direct relationship to our audience. What makes people happy,” he explained.

Improve the Advertiser Experience

Attention appears to be the most valuable commodity for advertisers, once the ad itself is viewable and unblocked. But how does one define attention? Dan Schiffman, CRO and Co-Founder, TVision, believes that, “Attention can be defined by the outcomes that occur after a person sees an ad.” But how much time does it take for a brand attention to occur? How many seconds? Schiffman says three seconds is that threshold for recall and awareness of that ad. But Julie Detraglia, Vice President and Head of Research, Hulu, disagrees. “It’s hard to believe that three seconds are enough for an individual. We have more work to do to understand what the threshold is.” She noted that Hulu only charges when ad completed 100% and the viewer can't skip ads.

Donna Speciale, President Ad Sales, Turner, has made it her mission to reimagine TV and advertising. “Our collective goal is to make advertising better for our fans and clients,” she explained, “We develop smart marketing initiatives across all platforms empowered with ideas and solutions to drive consumer outcomes.” She advocates a new direction for measurement. “We need to transact on those formulas that show how people are actually consuming our content.” 

Next Steps

Maybe the era of competitive cooperation is here and will lead to much needed new industry measurements and standards. Apropos of OpenAP, the Advanced Audience Platform created by Turner, Fox and Viacom that has now added NBCU to the mix, Speciale noted that, “We have a lot more work to do. No one company can change the industry. We need to hold each other accountable so we all win.”

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com