These Three Initiatives For Audience Measurement Are Helping Marketers

With the growth of streaming naturally comes digital viewing of content and advertising. This, in turn, has created a massive shift for both the entertainment and advertising industries. And the consequences are appreciable. “As a result of this shift, there’s a significant need for more accurate measurement of digital media consumption, and for updated measurement methods for linear broadcast and cable networks,” summarizes Todd Holmes, associate professor at Cal State Northridge.

The timing, however, is interesting. The shift comes at a time when the industry is more open than ever to new alternatives, in part on account of certain issues that have brought to light the need for better and more reliable data. As a result, the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), a trade association that promotes the interests of the television advertising business for cable and broadcast television networks, as well as other programming distributors and creators, launched a task force to engage with initiatives that encourage better counting of streaming subscribers, including the following three headed up by ANA, OpenAP and NBC Universal, respectively.

ANA Cross-Media Measurement Initiative

The Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Cross-Media Measurement Initiative is a partnership between the ANA and ComscoreSCOR
, a global media measurement and analytics company. This partnership is developing a privacy-preserving cross-media measurement solution for marketers.

“The goals of this initiative,” explains Holmes, “is to deliver a complete and transparent view of ad exposure across all media; enable planning and optimization for deduplicated reach and frequency across all media channels; and provide the ability to evaluate the complete and cumulative effects of a campaign across all media channels and devices, including the value of specific media channels.”

Ultimately, their approach, which uses a methodology called Virtual People ID (VID), preserves privacy while maximizing reach and does so by assigning synthetic identifiers to media audience behavior; this eliminates the need to use digital identifiers such as third-party cookies or mobile ad IDs. “Cross-media measurement has been a longstanding yet elusive goal for the marketing industry,” said ANA EVP Bill Tucker, “This partnership with Comscore and the test we are conducting represents a significant step toward realizing our objective.”

OpenID

An initiative by Open AP, OpenID uses a unique identifier that enables the resolution of both linear viewership and digital audiences into a common identity framework. This means that it can capture the audience data for both traditional broadcast television and streaming services in one place. And it also can define the audience down to a person. Doing all this unlocks cross-platform capabilities for advanced TV advertising.

“With this launch, advertisers will start every campaign by identifying an audience that will be resolved to a set of OpenIDs, which can be broad or narrow based on campaign objectives,” explains Holmes, “OpenID enables efficient matching with viewership currencies for distribution to multiple television publishers, evolving advanced TV from age and gender demographics to ID-based targeting.”

The networks that are using OpenIDs as of now include AMC networks, A+E Networks, Crown Media, Discovery, Disney, FoxFOXA
Corporation, NBCUniversal, Univision, ViacomCBS, WarnerMedia, and The Weather Channel. This broad adoption is an indication that TV publishers are up for both collaborating and investing if it means accelerating the speed to market for advanced targeting.

“The OpenID framework creates a crucial foundation for cross-platform measurement and ultimately helps fuel a more vibrant and effective TV ecosystem,” said President & CEO of the VAB Sean Cunningham, “There is a large and obvious spike in advertisers seeking advanced audiences in cross-screen, multi-platform viewing environments, and the creation of a common cross-platform ID provides a scalable way for TV publishers to provide a more holistic view of cross-screen reach.”

NBC’s Innovation Forum

Through NBC’s forum, stakeholders from every corner of the industry are be able to learn about all existing measurement solutions. “What we learn, the entire industry will learn,” says Kelly Abcarian, “The potential for industry-wide innovation makes transparency more important, so that everyone can share in the findings—and the future.” According to Abcarian, the Measurement Innovation Forum works to: (1) Understand the current and emerging players in measurement and identify opportunities to create an interoperable ecosystem of solutions; (2) Partner closely with existing initiatives to create and publish an industry-wide framework and best practices; (3) Discuss and strategize how new measurement yardsticks can scale across the industry.

Effectively, this initiative supplements the work of ANA, VAB, and OpenAP. And there are a number of advertisers and measurement companies which are now part of the forum. Advertisers participating include Citicorp, Ford, L’Oreal, Rocket Mortgage, Target and Volkswagen. Trade groups are taking part as well, including Ad Council, the Four As, the Association of National Advertisers, the Advertising Research Foundation, the IAB, Open A.P., TVBVB
, VAB and the Media Rating Council. And among the participating agencies are 360i, Active International, Canvas, dentsu, GroupM, Havas, Horizon Media, Magna, OMD, Publicis, RPA and Wieden+Kennedy.

Results

While the task force has only been around for just over a year, it’s already yielding results. Pursuit Channel edged out their closest network competitor for a leading automotive account thanks to Comscore TV’s stable national reporting and innovative Advanced Audience segments. BET started applying an innovative approach to the way tentpole events are measured. And Stirista leveraged their clients website identity tools and audience profiles to retain existing customers and acquire new ones via their data-driven solutions.

“Those … results reveal an ad marketplace embracing newer measurement options with escalating urgency,” says Sean Cunningham, President and CEO, VAB, “and the increased competition in all-screens/cross-platform TV measurement is shaping up to be a bigger realized win for marketers searching for business and brand growth—sooner rather than later.” With the initiatives succeeding in accelerating the pace of overdue innovation in media measurement and currency, it can be expected that we will continue to see and experience their benefits in the year to come.