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If it wasn’t already clear from skyrocketing streaming statistics and the company-wide reorganizations that shook up executive suites across the television industry, streaming is very much the future. That means the push to bridge the measurement and currency gaps between traditional linear television and the rapidly accelerating streaming space has never been more frantic.
Firms like Nielsen and Comscore are rushing to update their measurement frameworks to account for viewership across screens as data firms double down on solving for tracking identity without cookies and in compliance with evolving privacy regulations. Even determining what set of metrics is best for media companies and advertisers that help them achieve their various business outcomes is up in the air.
What the industry is clear on, though, is that the next iteration of TV measurement will be crucial to help television compete with digital giants for marketing dollars.
“I wake up every day worrying about this, and this is one of my favorite things to work on,” Scott Brown, Nielsen’s head of audience measurement, said earlier this month at CES 2021. “It’s one of those scenarios in the industry where we’re going to really help the market grow instead of lag behind.”
Harder than it looks
The edict from television top brass is clear—“no more linear versus digital,” Disney ad sales chief Rita Ferro told Adweek in December—but executing on that vision is more complex. Television companies are focused on bringing together what they say is the best of both worlds, taking the reach and precision of traditional television ad buys along with the targeting capabilities and data that come from digital pipes.
“The actual ad ecosystem as it relates to TV or premium content actually works really great: It’s an open, fully transparent, safe marketplace,” NBCUniversal’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships Linda Yaccarino said during a CES 2021 panel. “It’s also been a really big challenge for companies like NBC to be compared to the tech platforms, so capable in the data-driven world—or as I say, counting stuff. It’s why NBC has been investing so many millions of dollars in the last decade to bring what works at linear television into the digital space.”
As broadcasters work to improve their own data and measurement capabilities, they are also updating their linear pipes with digital capabilities to make more of their traditional advertising addressable, giving marketers the option to buy similarly and compare their results across different screens. A number of initiatives from Nielsen, the Project OAR consortium and others are working on expanding addressable advertising capabilities for broadcasters. That convergence is a necessary step to give television companies more leverage in discussions with marketers, who are facing intensified pressure to show results.
But media companies alone can’t offer a full picture across the entire media ecosystem, where consumers are watching programming across various services on multiple devices. That’s where data and measurement companies are trying to step in, helping develop methodologies to track more broadly.
“This is just the way that the sight, sound and motion world has to compete,” said Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer of data connectivity platform LiveRamp. “Otherwise, walled gardens who give you that real-time attribution will continue to get dollars, and those dollars are just becoming more accountable.”
An accelerated timetable
Nielsen, long the standard of television measurement, is already in the process of overhauling its measurement framework. After appointing Scott Brown to the post of head of audience measurement in August, the measurement mainstay in December took the wraps off its overhauled video measurement option, Nielsen One. It’s designed to offer up a single metric across linear and digital platforms alike, including live TV, DVR, video-on-demand, connected TV, mobile and desktop or laptop viewing.
The big catch, though, is the timeline: Nielsen One is at least two years away from rolling out, and Nielsen says the industry won’t fully transition to or transact on those new metrics until fall 2024. In the meantime, there are a lot of new metrics the measurement company is rolling out this year to introduce the digital underpinnings of the future.
In January, Nielsen began rolling out a new methodology for measuring digital audiences, and is in the process of bringing on some additional data sources to complement its in long-running panel data. The aim, Brown said, is once again a focus on the best of both worlds: panel data that has long served as a reliable currency for the industry, plus data from walled gardens, set-top boxes and smart TV devices that help provide a comprehensive view.
“What we describe as our holy grail is to take the world of linear, which is becoming more addressable, and start to combine it with one single product, so that we can show [marketers] a true de-duplicated audience, whether the campaign was delivered through a streaming platform, whether it was also on linear, or whether it was more served in a targeted fashion on a live broadcast,” Brown said at CES.
Urgency breeds collaboration
As the drumbeat of unified measurement grows louder, one positive side effect is an urgency that is encouraging collaboration between partners. Data companies, media companies and measurement firms, and even the walled gardens are offering up information, recognizing more money is to be made when there are unified currencies and metrics for marketers to work from.
“On the buy side and on the sell side, there’s a desire to understand delivery and performance of advertising in a more uniform way,” said David Algranati, chief product officer at Comscore. “And these solutions do require a great participation and collaboration between the media property and the measurement company.”
But there’s also a recognition that more types of metrics are necessary to give all parties the data that they need as their businesses transform—especially in streaming, where some platforms are balancing several business objectives at once.
“Unless you’re serving ads, the eyeballs in that day-and-date world are less relevant to the overall engagement of the service,” WarnerMedia studios and networks chair and CEO Ann Sarnoff said at CES. “The amount it costs you to acquire a subscriber, the churn level every month, how many people leave the service, what you can do to reduce the churn, reduce your cost of acquisition—it’s a completely different set of metrics that the industry is not geared to measure.”
Meanwhile, marketers face the same challenge. “Just getting a reach number doesn’t necessarily help if you’re trying to push, let’s say, delivery services,” Algranati said.
Those shifting needs from various parties mean marketers and measurement providers are prepared to juggle multiple metrics when evaluating advertising, not a single measure of success.
“I don’t believe that the market is heading towards a single metric in this new fragmented way, because it doesn’t make sense,” Prasad said. “We believe that metrics will be dynamic, and that they will be connected to interoperable identity.
“It wouldn’t make sense to do all of this cooperation, spending all of this energy on creating an audience-driven approach that’s being measured against outcomes and on actual engagement, and then resort back to siloed age and gender measurement.”
Preparing for a privacy-focused future
All of these efforts are for naught if measurement firms, data companies and platforms are unable to tell marketers about the viewers watching their ads and track the results of their programming or advertising efforts. Trying to track and understand that identity is the core of what measurement firms, data companies and media companies are all working to solve, and as privacy regulations shift, designing a foolproof approach is tricky.
But as with the acceleration in streaming, the sunsetting of the third-party cookie—which helped marketers understand digital behavior but whose invasive tracking has drawn concern from legislators and the public—is driving that rush for solutions. Measurement firms like Comscore and Nielsen are focused on future-proofing their approaches while adjusting how they collect both big data and panel data, but there’s no surefire way to know a new design is going to work.
“Our privacy terms with our panelists have needed to evolve, to reflect updates and changes to these regulation,” Algranati said.
As industry kingpins push out incremental changes and navigate the hurdles, the problem remains frustratingly simple—and the solution is still elusive.
“Ultimately, what you need is a metric that both sides agree represents the value of what just happened,” Prasad said. “There’s all this discussion of 2024 and change-overs. But the future of measurement, it’s all happening now.”
Yaccarino recently told Adweek she’s “more optimistic than ever” that the industry will finally solve the measurement conundrum it has grappled with for years: “That’s a lot of activity in that area, and we’re going to get there.”
