What Are Data Companies Contributing to the Television Market? An Overview of Offerings – Part 6

This is the sixth and concluding article in a series on the range of television measurement data solutions being offered by data companies in the industry. In Parts One through Five, participating companies answered a range of questions on their data from their business model to attributes to challenges in the industry. In Part Six we look at the future potential of the data with the goal of a standardize-able industry standard. Is this possible in the short term or are we mired in competitive differences that will push any industry solution out into the long term?

My Take: I believe there is a great interest in developing a standardize-able metric or series of metrics for cross platform measurement. But the challenge will be in deciding exactly which metric that will be. Some say delivery might be the best connector. Others have offered reach and frequency. But one thing is clear to me - Until we can agree on the one metric that will tie all measureable platforms together, it will all be just branding and market positioning which only adds to the continued fragmentation in the space.

Question 6: What do you see as the future potential for your data to be used in creating a standardize-able measurement for the industry?

Joan FitzGerald Senior Vice President, Television and Cross Media Service, comScore: comScore provides objective, third-party measurement across platforms – wherever and whenever content or advertising is consumed. What’s important is that buyers and sellers agree up front to the metrics used to transact and those metrics must come from a neutral, consistent and reliable source. Xmedia provides the industry with the flexibility they want and need to plan and evaluate audiences across all screens.

Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President, Watch Product Architecture, Nielsen: Nielsen has always and will always provide a standardized, 3^rd party independent measurement that allows the marketplace to transact in a productive and orderly way. The main piece missing today from the future of Total Audience measurement is industry consensus about what metrics will be used to trade in a world that combines unit based and impressions based ad campaigns. Years ago, when the industry collectively agreed upon C3/C7, they didn’t envision the rapid evolution of digital content and the impact on the business in terms of monetizing audiences. Our Nielsen heritage has been built on helping to establish that currency.  In order to continue to meet the needs of our clients, we are encouraging the entire industry to work together again to redefine currency around the evolving media universe.

Cathy Hetzel, Rentrak Corporate President: Rentrak is being used today as the STB-based currency in television. Everyday local stations, national networks, agencies and advertisers are using our ratings with advanced demographics to buy and sell advertising. We are integrated into agency buying systems, such as MediaOcean’s OX system, Strata and Imagine. We are driving many of the engines for programmatic buying and we will continue to work toward unduplicated reach for our cross platform offerings. We are the only massive and passive based television currency currently undergoing the process of MRC accreditation. We believe strongly that there will be a sample currency and a census currency in the marketplace for many years to come.

Leslie Wood, Nielsen Catalina Solutions: There are two places where I see that our work can be standardized. One is in the targeting realm. What we provide are buyer-graphic indexes. We apply those indexes to a Nielsen peoplemeter rating and are trying to find the likelihood a certain consumer will watch this program. That is our Buyergraphic Index which is fairly standardize-able. We’ve done a lot of work on the predictability of those numbers as it relates to demographics. On the other side is measurement and this is my core passion – measuring the core effects of advertising. The current quality of measuring the effects of advertising is very uneven, particularly in television. This is an area that the industry should put enormous effort into. We have put in enormous effort but there are key pieces where we need to know that what we are measuring is valid and there is a long way to go there.

Bill Feininger, President FourthWall Media: Set top box data is now common place in measurement systems.  This will not only increase in use, but be pressed into service for dataset matching and targeted advertising.  FourthWall Media already aggregates data from almost two dozen MSOs, as well as collects all the Charter Communications data, so in effect, we are already a de facto standard.

Charles Buchwalter, President and CEO Symphony Advanced Media: This is present potential for Symphony Advanced Media. Our VideoPulse product launched on September 1, and several companies are already using our data on a charter client basis as the primary source for tracking true cross media content and advertising exposure.

Eric Schmitt, Executive Vice President, Communications, TV and Media. Allant: The Allant Audience Interconnect® is software-and-data-as-a-service to which has been purpose-built to standardize and scale advanced TV and premium video advertising.   Campaign measurement is a key piece of the platform, and is uniquely powerful when coupled with support for custom audience segments and cross-platform industrywide execution. 

Frank Foster, SVP General Manager, TiVo Research and Analytics (TRA): For media to be deemed relevant, advertisers must have the insights that allow them to evaluate multiple platforms with the same metrics. To address that need, we’ve built what we believe is the largest cross-media single-source sample comprised of directly matched second-by-second tune-in data, online exposure, and purchase data from more than 2 million homes. Since our data is 100% matched, while still meeting strict privacy standards, we can measure how effectively advertising drives consumer behavior from exposure to purchase without the uncertainty that comes with modeling or fusion.

Mainak Mazumdar Chief Science Officer, Simulmedia: Simulmedia is not in the business of being a standardized currency or measurement platform. Our data is used by our platform to deliver audience-targeted TV advertising campaigns that drive an advertiser’s business outcomes, and deliver the strongest return on investment for an advertiser’s TV budgets that is available in the marketplace today.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

TRA Licenses Nielsen Data to Remove Friction

TRA announced that it would begin to license Nielsen data and include it in its Media Analytics interface.  This announcement, part of a breakfast panel at CBS’ Paley Center, was part of a bigger discussion of Big Data or as CEO Mark Lieberman says “naturally occurring data” in the media marketplace. 

The main purpose in adding Nielsen data was “to remove friction in the media buying” according to Research CRO Bill Harvey. Before adding Nielsen, TRA “had a problem lining up the Tribune program titles with the Nielsen program titles and it was a major impediment.” By aligning Nielsen as-run information with TRA’s STB data, it is possible to take some of the error out of program over-runs and matching to commercial pods. TRA CEO Mark Lieberman explained that TRA is also licensing Nielsen ratings and DMA definitions and program titles for use in TRA’s analytics and make it easier to use. Short videos of Bill’s and Mark’s remarks can be found here:

The breakfast meeting included a panel that was moderated by David Verklin and included Starcom’s Amanda Richman, CBS’ David Poltrack, Bruce Lefkowitz of Fox, Todd Dixon of Empire and Horizon’s Brad Adgate. The questions spanned such topics as the relevancy of TV today, the importance of Data and Analytics, TiVo as a disruptor … or not … and what the future holds for media in general. 

Why is TV still so relevant? Lefkowitz explained that TV is still a part of our culture, informing social chatter around the watercooler and forging a unifying factor for media. For Poltrack, TV offers an engaged and attentive audience that, via a second screen experience, can bring the transaction element into TV viewing. None of the panel thought that TiVo was a disruptive presence in the television viewing experience. In fact, according to Adgate, more than half of all ads are still viewed in playback because TV is still a laid back, relaxing entertainment experience. 

Yet through the morning, one thing was clear; the era of Big Data and its importance in addressable advertising campaigns, in planning buys and stewarding contracts has arrived. Not only are clients such as Todd Dixon at Empire using Big Data to help optimize frequency to an individual targeted level, but, as Amanda Richman of Starcom explained, “Big Data matters.” Her agency is very committed to making TV work harder and smarter through the use of such data. “Big Data allows for a deeper dive GRP to ‘PRP’ – purchase per rating point,” according to Bruce Lefkowitz. In fact, Dixon found that using Big Data on the local level, even across 83 DMAs, was much more efficient than buying nationally because of its efficient target-ability. 

It is clear that market momentum is currently with Big Data and if anything, the speed at which media companies embrace this data will increase and become more creative and complex. Verklin concluded that there is a generational change in the media business. Certainly, the future belongs to those strategists who embrace Big Data analytics in the course of their business practices.

The Question of Cross Platform Metrics

There are two major research issues facing the industry now and both of which are gaining traction in the Research sector as evidenced by the attention they received at the recent ARF 7.0 Insights Conference.

One is how we define television with the question being, “Is it the television set that forms the basis for the US TV Universe or are sets no longer the best base on which to measure the  ability to receive ‘television’ content?” The other, a corollary to the definition of TV, is “What are the best cross-platform measurement metrics to use for the media industry?” Are there certain functionalities that work best for one platform that do not translate across platforms or can we come to an agreement for a standardized cross platform metric that captures all viewing and usage to give us a 360 degree total?

The recent ARF 7.0 conference in June offered an opportunity to explore all of these issues in greater depth. In asking industry researchers at the conference about the best cross-platform metrics, I found a range of opinion from Nielsen’s Leslie Wood who said “It already exists. It’s advertising response” to TRA’s Bill Harvey who said,”ROI is the key deciding factor” to GroupM’s Lyle Schwartz who doesn’t think there is a singular metric for any medium. While there could be baseline metrics across all media such as reach and frequency, Lyle believes that there is an additional need to create specialty metrics based on the specific attributes of the content platform. 

Carat’s Billie Gold had another opinion. She said “there is no definitive common metric to measure cross platform viewership since both mediums are different in nature. However the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings product, used in conjunction with its existing television audience measurement capabilities, is the closest we can get to true cross-platform measurement at this time. It is not an exact comparison, but we’re definitely getting closer towards an acceptable comparison.”

Jane Clarke from CIMM explained that there was interest in the creation of a single source, scalable measurement system and perhaps a move away from pure demographics to “targeted exposure metrics.” But there was also the opinion of ESPN’s Glenn Enoch who said that a single source application may not be possible and the solution may be to create a calibration hub where existing datasets can be fused. And with second and third screens of various sizes, Richard Zackon of the CRE posited that it may be necessary to take into account the size of screens as part of the measurement criteria. 

These are all valid and intriguing thoughts. Here is a short video on all of the responses collected at the ARF 7.0 conference:

In my opinion, the question of the perfect cross platform metric may slowly evolve towards a standardized solution as connected TVs filtrate through the population. Since these television sets can use IP for program delivery, the measurement criteria for “traditional” television may eventually evolve and coalesce into IP measurement.  Until then, it will be interesting to see some of the creative applications that are developed for cross platform total measurement.

Improving Local Measurement With Return Path Data

Of all the potential uses of return path data, local measurement arguably offers one of the top initial values. Recently I interviewed Pat Dineen, SVP Nielsen about his work using return path data in conjunction with Nielsen’s current local panel methodologies. Pat spoke of hybridization of return path data (RPD) with the Nielsen panel in all three types of local market methodologies – the People Meter Markets, the Household meter markets and the Diary measured markets. This method offers the ability to include Nielsen demographics while expanding the household sample size.

His interview sparked discussion about how other measurement companies use RPD to measure local markets. In this RPD land rush, it is interesting to note the different approaches. These approaches are often based on availability of tuning data and the types of data streams that are fused or matched to it.

Bruce Gorelich, CRO Rentrak, says that his company has been focused on RPD data for local measurement for well over four years. Rentrak currently has 8 million homes in its measurement footprint (1 in 14 U.S. homes) and this data comes from several sources – Satellite (Dish), Telco (AT&T), MidContinent and FourthWall – which Gorelich says is all available via the interface. Collectively this represents 98% of all residential zipcodes and 90% of all commercially available set top boxes.

Bill Harvey, CRO TRA, notes that TRA now has per-market sample size of over 50,000 homes in 10 markets, over 25,000 homes in 18 markets, 10,000+ in 26 markets, 3000+ in 45 markets and over 1000 homes in 70 markets. One case study enabled an advertiser who does all spending in spot TV to optimize the buy through TRA’s Media TRAnalytics® Optimizer. The client ran hundreds of reports with this granular data to decide what media to place in 37 local markets.

Jeff Boehme, CRO Kantar Media North America, describes their approach with RPD based on satellite & cable homes from both a national and local perspective. DIRECTView‚Ñ¢ is their national service based on a managed sample of 100,000 HHs. Kantar Media is also expanding their local RPD with additional Charter markets totaling 1 million HHs by May of this year. Both services are matched with external datasets to combine audience behavior with product purchases. At this point, Kantar Media is not offering a standalone general market ratings product. According to Boehme, Kantar has  made a strategic decision to partner with Nielsen for local market audience measurement. He says, “If you only have RPD you are missing a piece of over the air which is impractical to model. We have agreed to work with Nielsen to help them enhance their Local Market Service product line and align our RPD with their traditional measurement. We believe that audience measurement will be driven by RPD, especially for the MSOs, satellite and telcos. It doesn’t mean it will replace traditional measurement, it but it will augment and enhance it. RPD is essential for all advanced measurement capabilities for advanced advertising such as addressable, interactive and T- commerce applications.”

Because of the increasing number of data sources, return path data is becoming more ubiquitous and is available across all geographical areas in some form. Rentrak’s Gorelich says while Nielsen builds up the data on the county level, Rentrak builds up the data on the zipcode level. According to Gorelich, “Counties are not as granular a level of neighborhoods as are zip codes. There are approximately 3,143 counties, parishes or independent cities in the United States and there are approximately 32,847 zip codes with at least 1 home in them. There is the potential for more gaps if you design weights around counties rather than zip codes.”

Even within all the different methodologies and the different sources and levels of data available on the local level, the hope for some national clients is that local return path data from its various sources – such as MSO, Telco and Satco - will be prepared in such a way that it can be holistically collected and merged to form a basis for a national measurement. Stay tuned.

Q&A Interview with Bill Harvey - TRA

Bill Harvey, Co-Founder, Vice Chairman and CRO of TRA has helped that company create a new type of buying measurement using STB data and custom databases. Bill has had an illustrious career in some of the biggest ad agencies in the industry and has written extensively about advertising, privacy and research policy. In this interview, Bill talks about his background, the ad agency world and TRA and how it uses Set Top Box data. TRA has recently published a sector evaluation on Set Top Box data companies.


The five videos that comprise Bill Harvey’s full interview are as follows:

Subject                                    Length (in minutes)
Background                            (6 :51)
Agencies                                 (4:20)
TRA                                       (6:19)
Set Top-Box Data, Privacy     (8:40)
Predictions, Social Media        (7:56)


In this video Charlene Weisler interviews TRA co-founder and CRO Bill Harvey about his background which spand an impressive agency career and TRA. This video is 6:51 minutes long:




Charlene Weisler interviews Bill Harvey who talks about Ad Agencies past and present. How can they improve their business model? This video is 4:20 minutes long:




Bill Harvey talks to Charlene Weisler about TRA - its formation, history, business model and improtant stats in this 6:20 minute long interview video:




Charlene Weisler interviews TRA's co-founder Bill Harvey about STB Data and Privacy issues. Bill discusses some of his early efforts at establishing privacy guidelines in this 8:40 minute video:




Charlene Weisler interviews Bill Harvey of TRA who offers some fascinating predictions for the next few years as well as his opinions on Social Media. This video is 7:56 minutes long:

Q&A Interview with Mark Lieberman - CEO TRA

Mark Lieberman, Chairman and CEO of TRA, is acutely aware of how the market valuates media and how the advances in technology can help advertisers get more information about their media effectiveness. In this fascinating interview, Mark discusses TRA and how it provides greater insight into viewer behavior, how the TV currency is changing, the targeting of swing purchasers, the use of set top box data in measurement and, looking ahead, some predictions for the next five years.

There are four insightful videos in that cover the following topics:

Subject Length (in minutes)
Background and TRA (6:38)
TV Currency (6:02)
Projects & Predictions (6:53)
Agencies and Swing Purchasers (4:55)




Charlene Weisler interviews Mark Lieberman, CEO of TRA who discusses his varied and extensive background including a stint in the George Bush administation. The video is 6:38 minutes long:





Mark Lieberman, CEO of TRA talks about the current TV Currency and how it can improve with the use of set top box data. This video is 6:02 minutes long:




Mark Lieberman talks about his industry predictions for the next five years as well as some of his current projects. This video is 6:53 minutes long:




Charlene Weisler Interviews Mark Lieberman who talks about agencies and TRA's measurement of swing purchasers in this 4:55 minute long concluding video: