What Are Data Companies Contributing to the Television Market? Overview Part 2 - Data Integration

In our continuing series comparing all of the data company offerings to facilitate and expand television measurement, I have asked a range of data company executives the same set of six questions. Last week, these executives described their company's data offerings that are in use in the television sector and whether they own their own data and/or aggregate datasets.  This week they describe their company’s data initiatives in greater detail.

My take is that while there are many creative approaches to television and cross platform measurement, there are still many divergent solutions that purport to measure the same thing. It is my hope that eventually all of these competing entities begin to collaborate and discover that some of these solutions can be merged to result in an even more powerful (and standardize-able)  measurement capability.

Question 2: Does your company have an overall data initiative to market and integrate your data into television analytics? If so what is it?

Charles Buchwalter, President and CEO Symphony Advanced Media: The best approach we have found is to start with the client’s own data direct matched onto the SymphonyAM panel. This enhances all the data on that seed sample, and allows extrapolation from the seed sample by fusion onto however many tens of millions of homes apply. The data analytics can then be done in parallel on the direct match small sample and the fusion match scaled-up big data sample to ensure the agreement directionally on all items that could affect the decisions made. A further quality assurance methodology employed is to use fusion on the maximum number of mutually measured variables.

Eric Schmitt, Executive Vice President, Communications, TV and Media. Allant: Allant has been focused on the integration of data into TV analytics for nearly 10 years. For premium video ad sellers (including distributors and network programmers), Allant’s Audience Interconnect® software platform matches cable, satellite and telco (collectively, MVPD) subscribers to other datasets to enable precise, audience based media recommendations across linear, VOD and online.  For ad buyers and agencies, Allant’s Advanced Audience Insight platform uses data from multiple sources to build custom audience segments.  Together, these tools and data provide common ground for audience segment definitions and measurement of true cross-platform campaign reach/frequency into target segments.

Cathy Hetzel, Rentrak Corporate President: RubikTM, Rentrak’s recently introduced television analytics platform, helps match TV viewing patterns with product usage in order to target audiences more effectively. Rubik taps into Rentrak's Advanced Demographics, which combine TV viewing with information about the products consumers buy and the cars they drive. The tool lets networks, agencies, and advertisers identify the most relevant target households, and combine multiple segments into a campaign target so that custom reach and frequency reports can be defined and calculated. Rentrak currently provides proprietary database management and analytical report solutions for many of our customers of relevant value and interest. We do the following:

­              Measure and maintain addressable campaigns for multiple MVPDs

­              Deliver cross-platform reporting for clients that deliver digital feeds

­              Deliver advanced reach and frequency analysis for agency partners

­              Unique custom first and third party data segmentation for specific advertiser clients

­              ROI exposure conversion metrics

Leslie Wood, Nielsen Catalina Solutions: All of our business is about integrating data for analytics and so a large piece is television. We have two key products. One is targeting and the other is measurement. They are all wrapped in something called Advantics which allows users to look at television programs or genres or dayparts or aggregates of programs to see how well they perform in terms of any behavioral characteristics that we have. Advantics can do both the pre-plan and the post buy. So you can estimate the future and you can look back, giving you all the data you need to the media planning, targeting, buying side. The other side of the business is doing measurement, looking at the effect of advertising on sales. We look at this as a cycle where you can enter at any time – you measure what the effect is of my advertising, you can look at all of the different pieces of your target and how advertising influenced them, you can pick a new target or modify your existing target, you can define that target, you can then buy off this data. Each time in the cycle you can improve the quality of your television buy and understand which parts of the audience respond and what they are responding to.

Joan FitzGerald Senior Vice President, Television and Cross Media Service, comScore: Measuring television and digital platforms in combination is crucially important to publishers, media brands, advertisers and advertising agencies.  In addition, radio and other media are important to expand the footprint for publishers.  comScore provides independent measurement and analytics so that clients can understand the total consumption of their content – regardless of platform – video and non-video – and quantify unduplicated reach across platforms.  Our solutions enable advertisers and their agencies to create cross-media packages combining elements from TV and digital to analyze unduplicated, incremental and overlapped audience reach and engagement across platforms. In addition, comScore has developed multi-touch attribution methodologies to measure the impact of television, digital and combined TV/digital advertising on brand sales and brand attitudes.  

Mainak Mazumdar Chief Science Officer,Simulmedia: All of our data is already integrated into our VAMOS platform and is used not only for planning future campaigns, but also for post-campaign reporting and analytics. 

Bill Feininger, President FourthWall Media: Yes.  We provide the base level information that our clients integrate into their products and services.  These services include television and cross platform measurement, ad placement (television and digital), programmatic services and a variety of new analytics services.

Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President, Watch Product Architecture, Nielsen: Nielsen’s data is the basis for the vast majority of television analyses that are conducted in the United States.  In our national TV panel, we collect viewership behavior and a broad array of household characteristics from over 26,000 representative households, expanding to 40,000 representative households by next year.  At that point, Nielsen’s TV dataset will be driven by metered viewership from over 100,000 people.  In about half of these homes, we also collect digital data including computers and multimedia TV devices, and tablets and smartphones by next year.  This data enables advertisers and agencies to identify the audiences they are looking for, and media owners to demonstrate the value their audiences offer to advertisers. Our clients leverage these broader insights and characteristics to help them monetize and transact upon their content. Nielsen’s data also helps our advertiser clients plan their marketing mix to reach the most valuable consumers, and then determine whether those consumers were exposed to the ads (Reach), whether the ads impacted their attitudes (Resonance) and whether they drove sales (Reaction).  This “3R” framework also helps media companies develop better content, allocate and optimize their inventory, and ultimately, drive revenue.  The 3R framework is our basic equation for advertising effectiveness: the more of your ideal audience you can reach, and the more intensely your advertising resonates with them, the stronger your sales lift – or reaction.

Frank Foster, SVP General Manager, TiVo Research and Analytics (TRA): Data needs context to be useful, so integrating our data into the TV analytics ecosystem is a priority. To that end, we work with DMPs to integrate our viewership/purchase segments into their solutions, making TiVo Research data available across multiple verticals. Our data can easily be imported into third party optimizers and allocation systems, so it can be used to directly inform media buys. Conversely, we aim to make TV data available to digital advertisers. We integrate data from Datalogix, comScore, LiveRamp, NinthDecimal, and others into our Media TRAnalytics platform so our clients can understand the impact TV and digital have together.  Our analysis is also increasingly used post-flight to give an unbiased evaluation of TV exposure. Since we have a 100% direct Household match, we can tell exactly which homes were exposed, rather than having to fuse or model a limited sample.

Is the Nielsen Acquisition of Arbitron Good for Business?

Probably one of the biggest media deals in recent years has been the proposed purchase of Arbitron by Nielsen. For those of us in research and who have used both services, it is ground shifting and for many throughout the industry, there is a question of how this might impact the measurement business.

Arbitron is more than just a radio measurement company. Its businesses expand into many areas of the media including portable people meters (PPMs) and Scarborough local market, interface software and a trove of patents and other intellectual property. For Nielsen, ownership of Arbitron’s PPMs will help “fill in the gaps” by facilitating a single source method for cross platform measurement through the use not only of the meters but also radio and outdoor. So for a company like Nielsen, which is currently the television measurement currency, the capabilities offered by an Arbitron acquisition will not only solidify Nielsen’s market position it could, as one media CEO stated, create an “artificial monopoly” that impacts ad agencies and those businesses that buy and sell on age and gender demographics.

Many of the top media executives I spoke to about this acquisition preferred to speak off the record - such is the sensitivity on this subject. The general consensus is that the purchase of Arbitron will narrow the field of competitive measurement options for media companies, especially for ad agencies and, by extension, programmers and networks, and could stifle innovation as a lack of competition could lead to complacency. However, most agreed that, without vocal customer opposition, the acquisition would (eventually) clear the anti-trust review. Competitors to Nielsen may emerge sometime in the future as “Someone we never heard of, some techie in Silicon Valley or in an Ivy League school. Google, if there were to acquire Rentrak and Comscore.” But for now, the past is prologue.

The competitive arena for television measurement once included both Nielsen and Arbitron. In 1993 however, facing an erosion of its customer base, Arbitron made the decision to terminate its television measurement services. That left only one company to measure television usage for the increasingly profitable television media market. Ironically, a year earlier Arbitron established itself as the sole measurement service of radio with the demise of Birch in 1992.  So there is precedent for in the industry for a single measurement company. Whether that is good for the media business or not is less discussed.

According to some media executives, consolidation of Arbitron’s radio measurement into Nielsen is not a huge concern. Radio advertising marketplace revenue is dwarfed by television. The money to be made by providing television measurement far exceeds that which can be made by radio measurement. However, the real value in Nielsen acquiring Arbitron according to these executive is that the IP developed for better radio measurement will actually have a profound positive impact on its cross platform measurement initiative.

For some executives, the continued dominance of Nielsen is the responsibility of the measurement clients. I quote one executive whose opinion mirrors others I have received - “It’s more than a bit disingenuous for media researchers to complain about the Nielsen monopoly on one hand and ask for single-source (or linked/fused) multi-platform measurement on the other.  You simply can’t have it both ways. The industry has been given a number of opportunities in the past to fund a competitor, but at this point (or even at those points 10-15 years ago) it’s simply too expensive a prospect, as you’d have to continue to pay Nielsen while you test a parallel trend with the competition. The simplest way for Nielsen to accomplish the multi-platform gold standard is to acquire competitors in the different individual media, which they have been doing, and of which Arbitron is the latest and largest.“

In this era of multi-platform devices such as computer, tablets and mobile phones, the silo’ed measurement of media does not currently give a true picture of individual consumer media usage. There is a great desire by advertisers and programmers for seamless cross platform measurement at the individual user level. In 1992, Arbitron launched a passive people metering device for use in their radio measurement business which might now prove invaluable as an important component in facilitating individual usage measurement across platforms. Once Nielsen ingests Arbitron, there will be no other company in the marketplace able to measure individual age and gender demographics for television in combination across platforms. The current currency suddenly cements its market position for the next generation of media measurement.

Nielsen is not the only company to measure media via a proprietary panel. There are several companies who maintain user panels, including Nielsen Net Ratings online measurement competitor ComScore. However, how that will play out in the market is another concern to some media executives. Will Nielsen, capitalizing on economies of scale that the Arbitron purchase will provide, squeeze competition through under-pricing or “add ons” for those measurement services with multi-providers?

Perhaps more worrying to some, Nielsen will soon be the only company with a portable people meter panel, online and television panels and the potential to measure out of home which has been a notable gap in Nielsen’s measurement coverage.  Does this create a type of artificial monopoly or is there simply no better alternative to Nielsen at this time? One executive says, “It’s probably a combination of the two. While Nielsen remains focused on audience measurement, the digital world seems to be moving more toward ad effectiveness. That’s where I think Nielsen may be overtaken. Also, Nielsen’s ‘monopolistic’ power is really driven by TV; in digital, there is plenty of competition.”

My opinion is that the subsuming of Arbitron into Nielsen is not good for the media business because it further consolidates measurement power into one single provider. Pro-active innovation thrives in a competitive environment and the one thing media measurement desperately needs now is innovation. But is the industry ready to pay for it?


What do you think? Feel free to comment below, or participate in this survey, results of which will be published by MediaPost."

Q&A Interview with Cathy Hetzel - Rentrak

Cathy Hetzel, Corporate President of Rentrak, is a pioneer in interactive television and set top box data. Her first role at Rentrak was to ascertain whether Rentrak’s home video business could be adapted to television. After helping to launch their Video On Demand measurement service by examining log data from the servers, she saw the possibility of set top box data as a new way to measure television.

In this fascinating interview, Cathy talks about Rentrak, set top box data providers and the competitive landscape. She also offers some insights into the media landscape over the next few years.

The four videos of the complete interview are as follows:
Subject                 Length (in minutes)
Background                     (7:42)
STB Data and Providers  (4:01)
Predictions                      (5:32)
Cross Platform                (4:46)


Charlene Weisler interviews Rentrak President Cathy Hetzel who discusses her background and gives an overview of Rentrak's STB mission in this 7:42 minute video.




Rentrak's Cathy Hetzel talks to Charlene Weisler about STB data, VOD data projection to national for measurement and other facets of media data in this 4:01 minute video:




Cathy Hetzel, President of Rentrak, offers some predictions on the future media landscape. She also discusses Nielsen's IPO financier Deutsche Bank and their industry reports in this must-see 5:32 minute video:




CW: Deutsche Bank, the financial institution that brought out the Nielsen IPO, describes Rentrak as lacking momentum and offers their opinion on which Rentrak customers will drop the service. In a world of speculation and market positioning, what is your response to Deutsche Bank’s prognosis?


CH: We respectfully disagree with Deutsche Bank’s assessment. They are simply wrong.Rentrak continues to make solid progress by integrating its census-level currency with third party processors such as Donovan, Strata and One Domain which enhance the tools used in the day-to-day business of buying and selling advertising. We have a robust client list and pipeline of local stations, national networks and advertising agencies. Remember, Rentrak is the only company that offers census-level VOD data to help our clients sell advertising and make important business decisions. This has always been a core part of our business and Rentrak continues to lead the industry as we expand our services to provide the most advanced cross platform intelligence available today.



Charlene Weisler interviews Rentrak President Cathy Hetzel who discusses Cross Platform initiatves, Addressable Advertising and Privacy in this 4:46 minute video:




Disclosure: I own Rentrak stock.

Q&A Interview with Jo Holz - SVP Client Research Initiatives, Nielsen

Jo Holz is one of the leading researchers in the industry today. In addition to her work at NBC, Children’s Television Workshop, iN DEMAND, and Oxygen, she is currently SVP, Client Research Initiatives at Nielsen. In her 30+ years in media research, Jo has experienced first hand the great shift in the television landscape from broadcast to cable to VOD.


In this interview, Jo discusses research’s unique role in a corporation (discussing how research can become more influential) and the custom projects she oversees at Nielsen. She also offers some insights into media transitions and future trends. Below are the five videos comprising the full interview.

The videos are as follows:

Subject                                         Length (in minutes)
Background and Media Research          (4:08)
Positioning Research                             (3:14)
CTAM                                                 (1:42)
Nielsen Projects                                    (5:18)
Transitions and Trends                          (7:33)


Charlene Weisler interviews Jo Holz of Nielsen who discusses her background and the field of Media Research in this 4:09 minute video interview:





Jo Holz, SVP Nielsen talks about how to best position Research in a company in this 3:14 minute video:




CW: Jo, both of us are long standing members of CTAM and have benefited from their great research studies. Can you talk about how you have used CTAM research results in your job?


JH: Yes. I got some great insights from the 3-D TV study that Nielsen did for CTAM a few months ago. This was probably the first consumer study about 3-D TV that actually exposed viewers to this new technology and then got their reactions to it, rather than just getting reactions to the concept. It turned out that there were issues related to having to having to wear the 3-D glasses. Those insights were invaluable in helping Nielsen and the industry at large to better understand the potential for this new technology.



In this 1:44 minute video, Jo Holz talks about CTAM and its value to her and the industry:




Charlene Weisler interviews Jo Holz of Nielsen who talks about some of her projects at the company in this 5:18 minute long video:




Jo Holz talks about industy Transitions and Trends in this 7:33 minute long concluding video: