As the annual TV ad-buying marketplace often known as upfronts season approaches, activity is ramping up around the way forward for measurement in the era of streaming and connected TV (CTV). In the years since Nielsen’s stumbles caused it to lose crucial accreditation (which it has since earned back), alternative measurement providers and streaming-focused media corporations have worked to bring competition and future-facing solutions to the market.
The Joint Industry Committee (JIC) founded last 12 months by national TV programmers, major media agencies, streaming platforms and other industry players has worked quickly to enable measurement solutions. In its most important step yet to ascertain and evaluate measurement standards, the group this month announced that Comscore and VideoAmp have been certified as transactable national currencies.
Chief executives from the firms which have emerged as a “Big Four” of currency-level measurement providers — Comscore, VideoAmp, Nielsen and iSpot — weighed in on the state of the industry and what’s to return at a Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) summit on April 3.
“It’s not ‘change is coming’: Change is here,” said Peter Liguori, executive chairman of VideoAmp, a business he claimed is providing measurement and currency for 98% of the TV landscape. “It’s here, it’s now, it’s accelerating.”
(*4*)Innovation and evolution
On the CIMM East panel, executives made it clear how much work has been done while still highlighting the promise of what could follow, especially if measurement firms proceed to innovate in the space and differentiate themselves.
“We’ve had many years upon many years of homogeneity and no innovation and no competition. Now there’s competition here,” Liguori said in a possible shot across the bow at the once-monolithic Nielsen. “Now there may be a freeing up of dollars to drive the innovation that the industry is asking for.”
That innovation includes developments around cross-screen measurement that enable marketers to allocate their investments more efficiently across linear and streaming TV. Cross-screen measurement is anticipated to stay a top priority for brands, not only at this 12 months’s upfronts, but in the future as the TV ad marketplace continues to evolve, explained iSpot founder and CEO Sean Muller.
“I feel, generally, the upfronts are going to get smaller and smaller over time. Scatter goes to get larger and bigger, and a number of the scatter inventories will likely find yourself being sold by programmatic platforms like The Trade Desk,” the executive said. “There’s an actual shift that’s happening, and it’s actually happening faster than people realize, so I feel this whole marketplace goes to look quite a bit different just a few years from now.”
This 12 months’s upfronts are prone to feel the impact of the last 12 months of progress around measurement. The JIC and the MRC have ironed out the differences of their complementary roles, and there may be more clarification around which currencies have transparent methodologies as the industry moves from using broad demos and gross-ratings points to impression-based transactions. But, as at all times, the process continues.
“If you take a look at where we were a 12 months ago, I feel we’ve come a good distance, [but] there’s still loads of wood to cut,” said Jon Carpenter, CEO at Comscore. “If you take a look at the transactional systems that sit between the buy and sell sides, there’s still a number of work that should be done to wash up a number of the friction that exists there to make transacting on currencies aside from Nielsen [possible].”
(*4*)Big data and/or panels
While several panelists took shots at Nielsen, either directly or obliquely, the mood was less contentious than the last time these executives were on stage, at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in January, as moderator and CIMM Managing Director Jon Watts noted.
At that event, Liguori and Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao sparred about their respective company’s capitalization challenges and debated the state of panels, which Liguori called, at the time, “deader than dead.” This time around, Liguori emphasized that VideoAmp uses “big data and panels, not panels and massive data,” noting a shift echoed by other panelists.
“I feel panels are going from the star of the show to a supporting role,” said Muller, noting that iSpot is the lead investor in panel startup TVision.
To understand — and deduplicate — which households and devices are reached by ads and content, big data is superior to panels, Muller explained. But for determining who’s in the household and really in front of the TV, panels are still higher than big data. For those reasons, iSpot uses panels as a training set for AI models which can be applied to big data to find out who in the household is watching. Similarly, Comscore, a pioneer of the big data approach, spends “tens of thousands and thousands of dollars” on panels, together with using a semantic web crawler to tug contextual signals from its publisher integrations, Carpenter said.
“We’ve been leveraging the combination of huge data and panel for the last 25 years,” the Comscore executive said. “We don’t see it as either/or — nobody solution can solve the challenges of measurement today.”
Unsurprisingly, Nielsen’s Rao made a more pointed defense of the methodology that has been at the heart of his company’s offering for years, at the same time as Nielsen makes investments and advancements in big data.
“Devices and massive data [are] not the same thing as people. I do know that feels like a cliche, nevertheless it’s actually true,” he said, noting how big data can undercount Hispanic and Black audiences. “Over time, perhaps the emphasis and bias will shift, but today, [panels] are critically necessary to measuring the entire audience and representing the entire population.”
(*4*)Winners and losers
Whichever combination and methodology of huge data and panels wins out, the measurement landscape will likely still be in flux. From the seven measurement firms invited to take part in the JIC process last 12 months, only Comscore and VideoAmp received certification, with iSpot conditionally certified until a final decision is made in June. Further contraction of the market continues to be possible.
“It’s taken a number of investment for there to be 4 people on this panel, and it’s as much as you all in the industry to reward the innovation, to reward the disruptors, to be certain that next 12 months it is a panel and never a fireplace chat,” VideoAmp’s Liguori said.
Innovation and disruption are expensive, with costs of servicing clients, standing up panels in addition to buying and processing data trending up. For the corporations on the CIMM panel, streamlining operations and offering best-in-class products and solutions to the market is the only way forward, based on Comscore’s Carpenter.
“Quite truthfully, there’s going to be continued consolidation on this space. There’s not enough money to go around to support four-plus measurement corporations on this ecosystem,” the exec said. “It comes all the way down to who’s got the solutions which can be meeting the demands of today’s marketplace, that are very much omni-channel and cross-platform.”
As with the whole lot economic, marketers will eventually must weigh the costs of measurement versus the advantage of results. In one example, VideoAmp was in a position to increase Pepsi’s reach by 20%, lower CPMs by roughly 10% and drive sales at double-digit percentage points, based on Liguori, demonstrating the case measurement providers must make to survive.
“Are you a price center or are you a revenue generator?” the executive said. “That’s the way you all will make your economic decisions: based on costs and measurement, or based on the only result that matters, sales.”
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