More Local Measurement Improvements. Nielsen Replacing Local Live Stream Only Data with Live+1

In looking back at the past year, we have seen seismic change in Nielsen’s local market measurement capabilities, stemming from a focus on improvements from increased and varied datasets to sample expansion. Now, starting in July, Nielsen will measure local performance on Live+1, which more closely aligns with consumer behavior viewing habits and national measurement, providing, according to Steve Lanzano, President and Chief Executive Officer, TVB, “more GRPs for stations to sell.”

Overall Local Measurement Improvements

In 2017 alone, Nielsen local measurement evolved to an all-electronic measurement for all 210 DMAs, incorporated return path data into all markets including the 140 still served by paper diaries, expanded Scarborough consumer behavior data into 59 more local markets up from the current 151 DMAs, added Comcast, Dish and AT&T’s DIRECTV and U-Verse set top box data, and added portable people meter data to enable local out-of-home measurement across all sized markets. Nielsen also announced that they would expand their panel by 15,000 TV audience meters in 7,000 homes across the 140 markets currently measured by local TV paper diaries as part of their effort to completely retire the diaries in early 2018.

Live+1 Measurement

Most recently, Nielsen responded to an industry request, as represented by the 4As and the TVB, to replace local live stream only data with Live+1, resulting, as Nielsen noted, in a more comprehensive metric of how consumers are viewing local content, especially as it reflects the daily and time-shifted viewing habits of consumers.

Monthly data will be available starting in July and daily reports (reporting on each Live+27 hour viewing window) will begin with the September reporting period (end of August.) The data will be available on all third-party media buying systems including Mediaocean, Strata, and WideOrbit, to ensure Live-Same Day and Live+1 data streams are reliably delivered and accessible via their respective platforms. Live+1 includes all live viewing plus any delayed viewing conducted within 24 hours of a program’s telecast including DVR playback as well as viewing in the buffer, a form of playback without setting the recording through the DVR.

For Nielsen, Live+1 more closely represents the new viewing habits of today’s households, where consumers are starting programs but then pausing them and finishing them at their own pace and viewing programs on other devices that do not follow traditional program airing schedules.

Industry Reaction

This has been met with a positive response by the industry as a way to better integrate local and national performance results. Kathy Doyle, Executive Vice President, Local Investment, MAGNA Global, noted that this initiative will move the needle for local. “At MAGNA, we have been exploring the possibility of moving Local TV investment to Live +1 currency for some time.  We’re pleased that Nielsen will begin to provide the data stream and appreciate having the ability to utilize a currency that gets closer to national,” she stated.

Where do we go from here? Lanzano doesn’t want to speculate on the next metric. But, “with advancement in technology and media measurement, it could be something very different than current data streams such as total audience measurement across all distribution channels and devices that a specific piece of content runs across. And ATSC 3.0 will provide data and measurement as good as anything else out there,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

TV Will Be Bigger Than Ever. Q&A with Eric Mathewson of WideOrbit

Eric Mathewson, CEO of WideOrbit, started his career in another numbers-intensive industry - equity derivatives at Kidder Peabody where he focused hedging transactions for venture capitalists and founders of Silicon Valley technology companies. 

During that time he says he gained “a strong appreciation for the importance of systems and databases for enabling consistent profits in exchange-based transactions.” The rest is history as he used capital gained in his Silicon Valley ventures to launch WideOrbit in July 1999 as a way to facilitate the buying and selling of media.

Mathewson has some very clear ideas about media transactions and his company WideOrbit is becoming the de facto go to system for processing media transactions. I asked him the following questions:

CW: What exactly is WideOrbit?

EM: WideOrbit is a software company that develops systems for managing the backbone of media companies. We run their programming and ad systems, which handles all their scheduling programming, yield optimization, the accounting of their orders, invoices, aging and everything else a typical enterprise resource planning software system does.  WideOrbit is now the largest company in the space.  We’re managing 3000-plus stations and more than $30 billion in annual ad spending, primarily in North America.

CW: WideOrbit faced some entrenched legacy competitors in the space. How did you break through?

EM: We always focus on customer referenceability, which is a higher standard than customer satisfaction. Our products and services should meet a level of excellence where end users are willing to recommend them to other end users. Over the years, 88% to 93% of our customers said they would recommend us to a colleague. That Net Promoter Score has been a huge source of growth and competitive advantage, and it makes a big impact on a customer’s willingness to spend more money with us.

CW: How are you handling cross platform buys and sells?

EM: Transactions where DSPs enable cross-platform buying inventory are really only just now starting to emerge. We’ve prepared for this kind of demand to scale by investing in technology that enables both Real-Time Buying in digital display as well as linear audio and video inventory.

CW: Generally speaking (and I know there is a wide range of targets) what is the most efficient way to buy media today?

EM: I may be a tad biased on this point. The most efficient way to buy media today is through programmatic platforms that aggregate vast amounts of premium inventory. With just a click of a mouse on the WO Programmatic TV platform, a buyer can access and aggregate their pick from upwards of $30 billion in TV advertising inventory. Because it is so automated, a buyer can easily discern which inventory is most efficient by using our data or data that they bring to our platform. The system also simplifies all the creative delivery and billing aspects of a transaction.

CW: How dominant do you see television in the traditional sense (the TV set as hardware) five years from now for the consumer?

EM: When we look at IPG’s ad market data five years into the future, television will have a larger footprint than all the combined elements of digital content delivery, including audio and video. From our perspective, I’m not sure it matters what the composition of content consumption will be. It’s our job to help our clients maximize their revenue regardless of how their content reaches consumers. We’re aggressively investing in both digital and linear for the benefit of the consumer and our clients. Regardless of the platform used, we want audiences to continue to be consume our clients’ content and for our customers to have the tools to maximize profits.

CW: Is there any new technology that we may not foresee right now but that could be disruptive to the media space?

EM: There will always be new technologies and behaviors that might be disruptive to traditional forms of business. Consumer habits change surprisingly slowly, though. Take on-demand viewing, for example. While it’s likely that anyone reading this article uses a DVR as their primary method for consuming video, live TV viewing minutes in the US still represent over 90% of total minutes watched. This is a full 15 years after early adopters started to have the ability to time-shift their viewing.

CW: Give me a short example of how WideOrbit works as well as its challenges and its opportunities in the media space.

EM: It’s hard to come up with a single simple example when we cover so much ground. WideOrbit software is the enterprise software that runs a media company. We manage all the processes of ad insertion for clients with varying kinds of business, including NBCUniversal’s owned and operated stations, Comcast SportsNet, Fox Sports Networks, DirecTV’s advertising operations, Entercom Communications, Time Inc’s and USA Today’s web sites, Canal+ and Orange France Mobile Ad operations.

CW: Can you give me some predictions - what will the media landscape look like 5 years from now?

EM: When I started WideOrbit in 1999 with a background in the Internet, it was obvious that the future was going to be a transition from analog linear delivery of content to IP-based delivery. My Silicon Valley pals thought the transition would take about 3-5 years. I thought it was going to take 10-15 years before people were consuming most of their video or audio over connected IP devices like a connected TVs or mobile phones. Now that WideOrbit has been operating for 15 years, I still think we’re 10- 15 years away from seeing the majority of video content delivered to individual IP devices rather than as a traditional linear broadcast stream

The automation of advertising transactions is increasing at rapid clip. A huge portion of digital sold today is via Real Time Bidding, and we’re starting to see that port to Mobile as well.  Digital video is getting there, but is still mostly transacted & targeted weeks in advance. TV does not have RTB yet, though we’re poised to see a dramatic increase in programmatic sales automation.

Finally, there’s been a ton of consolidation the last 4-5 years in the broadcasting sector. I expect it will continue over the next 5-10 years, though the bulk of it is probably behind us.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com
 

The Next Big Step Towards Local TV Programmatic

There is a lot of talk about programmatic moving into television but there are few experts in the industry when it comes to programmatic specifically in local TV. Magna’s Janice Finkel-Greene is one of those experts. She knows local broadcast and her collaboration with Wide Orbit in the area of local broadcast programmatic has led to a transformative new initiative called “Wide Orbit Central” which has been announced this week. 

I sat down with Finkel-Greene who filled me in on the details in this video.

She explains, “What we are trying to address with this new application is to improve the local buying process as we introduce elements of programmatic buying to it… It puts the buying process into an automated framework.”

Currently, buying local broadcast is time consuming. It is bought by individual market and tends to concentrate in low value inventory. There is also the issue of local television measurement which is challenged by low sample, large relative error and therefore performance bounce. This new application, available to all agencies and broadcast stations and affiliates, is considered “programmatic in spirit” in that it is console to console with near real time buying and reporting. It is connected directly to a traffic system (Wide Orbit) as opposed to connected to a source of inventory like other local sellers in the space. Finkel-Greene describes the application as “local TV programmatic on a national scale offering the ability to buy all broadcast across the US.” While it does not include cable at this time, there are plans to expand into cable as a next step. 

The stations decide which inventory they want to sell by DMA. Finkel-Greene says that the system is transparent in that it surfaces “markets, stations, times and dayparts. Currently, programmatic TV is a dark pool arena for local TV – there is not a lot of disclosure.” What Wide Orbit Central offers is a data driven solution, according to Finkel-Greene who notes, “We overlay qualitative data and if a station offer meets our criteria, we can buy it. It is data driven, not whimsical.”

Finkel-Greene concludes, “The transparency and speed of the Wide Orbit Central platform creates the feedback loop we need for continuous optimization.  It makes insights actionable by providing the opportunity to place buys nationally while targeting to the local market specifics.  It’s the best of both worlds.”