NBCUniversal Reveals Unified Measurement Currency Results with iSpot

If anyone knows media measurement, it is Kelly Abcarian, previously with Nielsen and now Executive Vice President, Measurement & Impact, Advertising & Partnerships, NBCUniversal. Along with NBCU’s Laura Molen, President, Ad Sales & Partnerships and Sean Muller, CEO iSpot, Abcarian presented the results of a pilot study that demonstrates how iSpot data can be accurately used as currency for OTT.

This year-long study is, “a major milestone to transform media measurement to reach consumers where they are,” according to Molen that helps to address the demand of advertisers for the ultimate cross platform measurement standard. Partnering with iSpot has enabled NBCU to contribute a new solution to the multi-currency future of the media ecosystem. “Some are stuck on legacy. Some are grading their own homework or measuring themselves,” noted Molen. But others are adopting new measurement currencies as evidenced by the large percentage of business that is now conducted on alternative measurements. “Already 40% of our upfront deals have been outside the traditional age and gender guarantees,” using a range of other data suppliers such as Adsmart, iSpot and OpenAP.

But the industry need at this point is to unify and codify a new currency using these alternative services and that is where the partnership with iSpot is pivotal to NBCU’s measurement goals. “They are our first certified partner and a trusted partner of the industry for over a decade,” she stated who has also received the seal of approval from many of NBCU’s advertisers. In fact, over 30% of the advertisers showcased in NBCU’s pilot study were already iSpot customers.

The ability to, as Molen said, “bridge the gaps between platforms and even across the buy and sell side,” to combine all of NBCU’s platforms with one unified method that delivers daily impressions within 48 hours is a major step in media measurement.

For Abcarian, this effort is all part of the bigger plan to, “move our industry forward with better measurement solutions and trying to keep up with the changing, ever growing consumer behaviors.” NBCU’s nine month journey to find the right measurement partner started with an RFP that attracted over 120 measurement providers across six measurement categories. This was followed by a test of 16 advertisers over the Summer Olympics across six cross platform currency partners. This was followed by a range of industry initiatives and announcements, the certification of nine NBCU partners further studies using the Winter Olympics and SuperBowl and finally, a 67 advertiser pilot test examining 158 brands.

“The key takeaway from our last nine months is that cross platform currency is here and it is ready to act and transact,” Abcarian concluded. A notable advancement was the mitigation of friction by using, “Direct server to server integration with iSpot so brands could measure all ads across all platforms and all ads fast.” After hours of training 800 users and testing across a three month period for the 12 brands, NBCU saw an average 546 million impressions per brand, an average mix of 9% on OTT and 91% on linear.

Advertisers were categorized by their mix of linear and OTT and fell into the following categories: Beginners with 10% OTT in their media mix, Experimenters at 10-20% OTT, Adventurers at 20-30% and Pioneers at 30%+. The results of the test were that brands with a rich mix of OTT did better with overall greater reach and acceptable levels of frequency.

NBCU’s goal of true scale integration cross platform measurement for brands’ unique campaigns was demonstrated by Muller who revealed the results of the pilot study which looked at a large retail brand. “Probably the overarching learning here is that linear and streaming can no longer be planned, measured and transacted in silos,” he explained. The retail brand began its campaign with a very low mix of OTT and over the span of the campaign, increased its OTT weight. The result was a significant increase in reach using more OTT, “as linear was saturated and more frequency was building up. And as they layered in streaming, there was pure incremental reach,” he revealed.

What did NBCU learn? All brands are underleveraged on NBCU OTT in driving reach. The pilot study proved that a careful mixture of OTT and linear, depending on the target consumer goal, can result in optimizing reach and frequency that can be smoothed out by moving media weight from linear to OTT.  “The power of premium (content) is both critically important across our linear and OTT platforms to drive reach and results for our advertisers. The ability to measure all viewing in a unified way,” enables advertisers to value and optimize all of their inventory across all platforms with an optimal mix in a frictionless and seamless way with de-duped reach and frequency, Abcarian concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

 

 

Sean Muller of iSpot Announces a Partnership with Neustar

Sean Muller, Founder and CEO, iSpot, just announced the partnership of his company with Neustar. The merging of efforts of these two companies has the potential to better consolidate and track the attribution journey of consumers. 

For Muller, Neustar offers, “market leadership in identity resolution and marketing analytics with dominance in digital multi-touch attribution, media mixed modeling and data security for the world’s largest brands,” while his company, iSpot, “is the market leader for real-time TV advertising intelligence, with products built on granular second by second Ad occurrence data enabling decision making for 40% of the TV ad market on a daily basis. Its business outcome analytics are increasingly used by networks and brands as a secondary currency.” And Neustar, Muller noted, is one of only two companies in the industry to do attribution on Facebook. 

Charlene Weisler: How will this partnership blend the two company’s unique capabilities?

Sean Muller: This is an integration of best-in-breed digital multi-touch and granular TV ad attribution.  Technology integrations just completed, the Neustar and iSpot IDS have already been matched and synchronized.  All of iSpot’s measurement across 12k advertisers is flowing to Neustar, and offline data flows from Neustar to iSpot’s dashboard

Weisler: How does this partnership enhance business opportunities?

Muller: In many ways, the marketplace brought us together for a unified solution. We found major CPG, auto makers, and retailers and financial service companies were combining our capabilities for a unified, granular view into performance across customer channels. By integrating, we’re making it easier for brands to have a unified solution. The implementation is done, clients can take advantage today.

Weisler: Are there any overlaps and if so, how will it be handled?

Muller: The technologies and capabilities are very complimentary fir brands wanting unified attribution with granularity on all ends. While overlap in capabilities are to be expected, KPIs and frameworks for managing customer touch points vary by industry and customer, so overlaps will be resolved by a true focus on delivering the best solution for the brand customer.

Weisler: Are there any gaps still to be filled and if so what and how would they be filled?

Muller: True and absolute unification will always have a distance to travel because there are brand exposures and influences that are impossible to always count, such as in person recommendation, subtle out of home and unmarked social influencer content integrations… This is the most complete unification technology suite on the market today full stop.

Weisler: Both companies offer attribution. How will processes be handled/merged/standardized (if going to do so)?

Muller: Each company will retain their attribution and performance scoring systems and methodology, however with data flowing more seamlessly between platforms, customers will be able to go deeper into things such as creative performance, time of day. The two will look to evolve offerings down the road beyond that.

Weisler: From an overall media ecosystem perspective, what are still the biggest challenges for buyers and sellers out there?

Muller: The biggest problem for the broader ecosystem revolves around quality, accuracy, scale and trust. The abundance of big, raw data sets and proliferation of analytics boutiques has given rise to low quality, low cost attribution services that are just plain risky as a means for making decisions. So the big challenges are educating the advertisers and media buyers on the importance of data fidelity, quality and consistency and giving brands the tools to properly leverage the insights to generate more revenues, cost savings and so forth.

Weisler: How will your partnership meet those challenges?

Muller: Together with leading brands, iSpot and Neustar are developing best practice guidelines other brands can use to make informed decisions when thinking about connecting ad investments to attribution or other analysis.

Weisler: Where do you see the ecosystem going and the role of this partnership three years from now?

Muller: The movement towards outcome based buying, optimization and performance guarantees in TV will continue to accelerate.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
 

The Confusion Between Data and Measurement

If you read enough about what is going on in our industry today, you will see that Data is an all-powerful presence. It seems to command every conversation and rule over every project. As statistician W. Edwards Deming once quipped, “In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
But in our effusive fealty to Data, we sometimes give it more unfettered control over decision-making than it deserves. Not all data is relevant and not all data is good and pure. It needs to be assessed, put into context and framed by measurement. While there is no measurement without some form of data, data alone is unusable unless it is put into a structured measurement framework.
So I knew you would ask for definitions. In the media world, data is essentially a rough and structure-less collection of different types of quantities that has the potential to be used to draw conclusions.  Measurement enables us to draw accurate conclusions from the data by creating a logical structure for analysis. Data needs a logical and accurate measurement to be useful. Measurement without data is irrelevant.

“There are a lot of companies and agencies in the market cobbling together raw data or portions of data and mistaking that for actionable intelligence,” noted Sean Muller, CEO of the TV measurement company iSpot. “In order to use data effectively, it’s critical that the inputs into a model are cleaned, normalized and contextualized properly or entire framework will be off. Doing things like attribution using data that is not measurement grade or that is ad-hoc in nature is like building a house on the beach without preparing for the weather and tide patterns. Things will crumble pretty quickly,” he added.

Today, there are all types of data being thrown off from devices, culled from the internet, collected by businesses and otherwise amassed through various means. Data takes on many forms and sizes. There is attitudinal data that is more qualitative (like a series of open-ended comments) and data that looks like a bunch of unrelated numbers (MAC addresses coupled with viewing levels).

In the old days of television measurement, companies such as Nielsen relied on small representative samples to project the full population of television households and viewers. They took their viewing data and created measurement using edit rules and algorithms that formatted and contextualized their dataset into a projectable larger behavioral context. And yes, it was fairly accurate … as long as your network had enough meters in the sample to get statistically reliable projections.

In 1985, Nielsen’s sample size of 5,500 represented approximately 84.9 million homes (or just less than 0.01 percent of all TV households) when media options were less fragmented. But as omni-channel options expanded and the number of viewing opportunities increased, this small a sample measurement just didn’t cut it anymore. Currently, Nielsen estimates 119.9 million U.S. TV households with a sample of 40,000, or just over .03 percent of total U.S. TV homes. To Nielsen’s credit, they continue to expand their sample to include more national meters, portable people meters and the incorporation of local meters into the national sample. All are steps in the right direction but it might still not be enough for the tiny members of our media club.

Today, ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) measurement in TV is shaking things up. Nielsen recently bought Gracenote, in part to help layer in a much broader sample set from TV makers, to collect information from the glass of TVs regardless of which device or service is being used to deliver content and ads to the home. But the challenge is how to add that specific data source into the traditional and profitable metric of GRPs. Independent companies like Inscape, which licenses glass level viewing detection from over 11 million VIZIO SmartTVs, are offering datasets that are being incorporated into new systems used by networks, agencies and brands.

“The world is awash in data but without context, it isn’t useful. And without proper measurement you can’t find proper context,” said Allison Stern, co-founder of Tubular Labs, which, she says, is the only company to measure social video on a truly global scale. “In Tubular’s case we organize a massive amount of data about social video and then using measurement we can find trends around content types, and the velocity, engagement rates, and even audience quality that helps people make decisions.”

The advancements of these new data sources, coupled with the exploration of new measurement metrics, is a healthy evolution for media from a delivery scorecard to business outcome attribution. Measurement companies such as iSpot contribute to that effort along with companies that offer cross platform planning tools such as Omnicom, VideoAmp and 4C. All of this is at the center of the new addressable advertising consortium, Project OAR, which currently has nine networks signed on. All of these efforts successfully move data from its raw form into a projectable measurement that can be applied to business intelligence.

 This article first appeared in TV[REV]

Header photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash