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

DPAA Explores the Mediapalooza

If you think at the television space has undergone change in the past few years, you haven't seen anything yet. In the world of out-of-home (OOH) digital placed based media, the impact of digital technology arguably surpasses all other types of advertising media. Which is why attending the annual DPAA conference is so important to understand the pervasiveness and effectiveness of digital messaging on consumer behavior. "It is a great time for video" exclaimed DPAA president Barry Frey, "The world is changing, disrupting, fragmenting and shifting like tectonic plates. Technology is forcing change upon consumer habits which is foisting change on media habits.  It is a Mediapalooza."

Indeed, now we can receive content and messages when we pump gas in our car, sit in a movie or a nail salon, shop at a bodega or a mall, use a vending machine, an elevator, a taxi or Uber or visit a doctor’s office. There are many new streams of data available through such novel sources as vending machines, airports, stadiums and gyms. The opportunities to reach consumers at every point in their day wherever they are, makes for new collectable datasets that can lead to an all-encompassing view of their behavior.

Currently “forty-one percent of OOH is digital,” according to DPAA Chairman François de Gaspé Beaubien and this is posed to increase over the next few years. Looking ahead, Frey predicts that "by 2017 more than half of all ooh revenue will be digital and 10% bought programmatically. There will then be a steep curve towards programmatic. *

So where is all of this disruption leading?

Change, Change, Change

Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategist for Publicis Groupe mapped out three areas of massive change - Globalization (which he deems “unstoppable”), Demographic shifts (noting that the average age in Africa is under 21 and the aging of China led to the reversal of the one child rule) and Digitization (which is driven by phones that today have “1000 more processing power than in the first space shuttle.”)

Marketing Without Borders

Tobaccowala reprimanded marketers who he said, “have to learn how to market. They haven't done so in 30 years. Eighty percent of what marketers were doing was logistics and managing revenue points.”  Relying on comparing yourself to a traditional set of competitors is risky because “threats and opportunities come from the outside.” Take, for example, the iPhone. “When iPhone came out Nokia and Blackberry did not take it seriously because it had no keyboard and, anyway, what did Apple know about phones? If you don't take people seriously, things happen. Benchmarking against other pathetic people doesn't make you any less pathetic.”

Forget Data Ownership. The Secret to Success is Storytelling

And the lure of owning your data? Tobaccowala is unimpressed. He said, “Owning data alone will be obsolete. It is how you access data not own it. It is the algorithms. Owning is so 1980s.” The secret to success is storytelling. “We have to recognize that we are talking to humans. Storytelling is very, very important. And mobility is also important.” He concluded, “Change sucks. The more things you want to stay the same, the more you have to change yourself. How do we change the people? We need to learn to collaborate.”

Ecosystem Dichotomies
Lori Hiltz, CEO Havas Media spoke of the “complexity of our business where the largest retailer does not own a store, where families are connected and disconnected at the same time and where technologies shape the dynamics of the new us.” Despite rumors to the contrary, David Sable, Global CEO Y&R asserted that, “TV is not over. Cinema is still strong. They say that print media dead but catalogs are having resurgence.” He also refutes the theory that as media gets fractured, TV audiences will likely get smaller. He said, “How do you define TV? We are watching more video than we have ever watched in the history of mankind. We are watching for longer and longer time. There are more screens and more shows to watch. In 1999 there were 26 series to watch. In 2014 there are 1715 series shows available to view, not including short form video.”

The Future is Expansive and Expensive

“Let’s set the record straight,” advises Sable, “The narrow definition of TV is digibabble. As Michael Wolfe wrote in his new book, TV is the new TV. It is simple. Think about the entire ecosystem. Twitter doesn't kill TV. It makes it better.” The idea that content can be free is unsustainable to Sable. “The future of free is dismal and not sustainable. Advertising pays for content. There are three ways to access content - steal it, pay for it or watch ads.” And just wait – “NFL contracts are up in 2022,“ Sable warns, “That is when the next big change will happen. That will be the next huge inflection.”