“Each client and agency will transact directly,” Mike Rosen, NBCU’s EVP of Portfolio Sales & Strategy, told BusinessInsider. Nearly all of NBCU’s ad inventory will be available, except for ads in future marquee events like the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup, according to Rosen, who will be one of the featured speakers at Beet Retreat 2017 in Miami.

While Target will be able to reach the audiences of its choosing, all of them will be served the same ads. NBCU is being assisted in its latest audience-targeting offering by 4C, which specializes in reaching people on social media platforms.

Last month, Beet.TV interviewed Rosen at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York, where he discussed the search for better ways of measuring and optimizing key performance indicators from campaigns. We are republishing the interview in the wake of today’s news.

It is now two and a half years since NBCU launched its Audience Targeting Platform (ATP), a way to let advertisers use data to reach specific audiences.

In that time, the company has offered up viewing data from 22 million Comcast set-top boxes, combined with other data from first- or third-party sources, to help marketers create more refined viewer segments.

Now Mike Rosen wants to go further.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the NBCU portfolio and sales strategy EVP explains the next step.

“As you start to unlock the value in the targeting side, how can you see the data to understand the outcome measurement?” Rosen asks.

“So… (we’re trying) to better understand what the different outcomes are from the different campaigns. We want to make sure the KPI we get is being properly measured and optimized.”

Rosen says outcomes for data-driven campaigns vary depending on many factors. But one thing all have in common is, they are better informed.

“We moved from simply looking at age-and-gender, which was the currency of our marketplace but also the only real measurement we had to transact, to something more richer – custom segments unique to each client,” Rosen adds.

And it is no longer pocket change that is changing hands in this way. This year, NBCU said it would make $1 billion inventory available for buying using data-based, non-Nielsen methods – equivalent to a tenth of its total ad revenue take last year.

These days, that kind of digital-to-physical attribution is totally achievable, and agency Mediacom is amongst those taking advantage of technology that uses mobile phones to follow consumers right up to the cash register.

“We’ve been working with tracking technology companies like Foursquare to allow us to tie back everything we do across channel and in content, back to traffic within stores, and then making those linkages to sales,” MediaCom advanced analytics managing partner Rachel Brook tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“When we go out of in commerce to in-store, we have the opportunity to find the individual … It’s an opportunity to act.

“We’re working with a couple of different location partners to really understand what best practice there looks like, and how we need to develop an implementation and execution process.”

A number of tech vendors are in the marketplace offering location data, much of it embedded in apps like Foursquare’s or in served ads that reside in other apps, to indicate where in the world a customer is.

Linking that location data back to a unified profile of a consumer who may have seen a prior ad gives brands the ability to close the loop on figuring out ad effectiveness and return on investment.

Next up, Brook says she is targeting new data partners and machine learning capabilities for Mediacom’s toolset.

This interview was held at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.

This becomes more evident when one considers that the MRC is still dealing with standards for digital ad viewability and traffic fraud. It’s made great progress on that front, but there’s no resting on laurels for George Ivie, Executive Director and CEO of the MRC, which audits more than 100 products a year.

“We’re consumed by those two business cycles, accrediting things and writing standards,” Ivie says in this interview with Beet.TV. Allowing that “the timeline is somewhat difficult,” Ivie says the MRC hopes to complete cross-media standards for digital video within the first quarter of 2018.

“It’s very difficult to develop consensus on these things,” a list of which includes:

• Establishing common metrics across different media types

• Measurement of duration

• De-duplication of audiences across media types

• Setting reporting parameters for days, dayparts, etc.

• How to measure audiences (age, gender, targeting characteristics)

“It’s a very complex standard that we’re working on and it has a big reach,” says Ivie. “Right now we’re concentrating mostly on video but it will be expanded later to include audio and print and other types of media.”

One of the more vexing aspects of video measurement is to differentiate the value of different types of media vehicles appropriately, according to Ivie. “Things like how long people stay with the video, how they interact with the video, if there is any measurement of interaction,” he explains.

These elements will be measured on a common basis and then compared with TV measurement.

“We also are concentrating on differentiating and measuring ads and content separately, which is a key concept of the standard,” he adds.

Asked to assess the MRC’s progress with regard to cleaning up the digital ecosystem, Ivie says viewability was a tough standard to set. “It certainly was highly disruptive in the digital marketplace. Very tough medicine to swallow. But now it’s been assimilated, made more consistent.”

We interviewed Ivie at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.

In that time, the company has offered up viewing data from 22 million Comcast set-top boxes, combined with other data from first- or third-party sources, to help marketers create more refined viewer segments.

Now Mike Rosen wants to go further.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the NBCU portfolio and sales strategy EVP explains the next step.

“As you start to unlock the value in the targeting side, how can you se the data to understand the outcome measurement?,” Rosen asks.

“So… (we’re trying) to better understand what the different outcomes are from the different campaigns. We want to make sure the KPI we get is being properly measured and optimised.”

Rosen says outcomes for data-driven campaigns vary depending on many factors. But one thing all have in common is, they are better informed.

“We moved from simply looking at age-and-gender, which was the currency of our marketplace but also the only real measurement we had to transact, to something more richer – custom segments unique to each client,” Rosen adds.

And it is no longer pocket change that is changing hands in this way. This year, NBCU said it would make $1 billion inventory available for buying using data-based, non-Nielsen methods – equivalent to a tenth of its total ad revenue take last year.

This interview was held at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.

Speaking with Beet.TV, Disney-ABC Television Group’s multiplatform research director Brian West had said the current state of multiplatform measurement was not good enough, and looked like taking a decade to reach completeness.

In this video interview, Nielsen product leadership SVP Jessica Hogue responds.

“It’s absolutely a fair call out,” she says. “There’s continued work to do there, it’s not standardised that everyone is in that measurement framework today. But it’s possible, we have the tools to do it.”

But Hogue says Nielsen has already spent the last few years working hard to give programmers and advertisers what they need.

She counters that Nielsen has expanded its TV measurement to new viewing options, including bundling census-level measurement. And she says Digital Ad Ratings now incorporated views of mobile and over-the-top (OTT) consumption.

“We have built a framework that allows for the flexibility, so we’re going to continue to evolve,” Hogue adds. “There will be new features.”

“Programmers want more. There’s always going to be work to do. It keeps us all employed.”

We interviewed West at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.

“There still is this tendency to prioritize measurement on desktop and kind of treat mobile and connected TV as also-rans in the measurement space,” says West, who is Director, Multiplatform Research, Disney-ABC Television Group.

The situation is acute given the amount of video consumption happening on both mobile and connected TV’s.

“We really need our measurement partners to find a way to bring their mobile and connected TV capabilities up to par with some of the more mature solutions they’ve developed for desktop based measurement,” West opines in this video with Beet.TV. “Because we’re at a point where this is the area where our growth is and we are no longer in a position where good enough measurement on mobile and connected TV is good enough for us.”

This is the main reason why ABC is calling for platform-agnostic measurement. He draws a distinction between the situation several years ago—when desktop “was basically platform-agnostic” and there were two major mobile operating systems—and now.

“But when you look at connected TV, if we began to do a platform-by-platform measurement solution, it’s going to take us a decade to get to a point where we have complete measurement,” West says.

Moving much faster “means piecing together data that is maybe tag-based, or possibly server- based, that’s calibrated against different types of demographic sources or other audience information sources,” he says.

ABC has research that provides an impetus for speeding things up in the form of the study it commissioned by Accenture that looked at spending by 20 different advertisers and ROI across media.

“It’s really essential that we define the groupings that we’re looking at a little bit differently,” West says. “We didn’t want to take this traditional TV definition and call TV everything that’s in a Nielsen C3 rating.”

One of the key takeaways of the Accenture study is that it’s typical for digital to get over-credited for advertising ROI and for TV to get under-credited.

West cites the halo effect of combining multi-platform TV with digital (a results lift of 18%) and the long-term impact of multi-platform, measured by the study as 1.3 times the impact in years two and three as in year one of a campaign.

“So multi-platform TV is able to drive impact for the brand and impact to sales over a longer and more sustained period of time,” says West.

We interviewed West at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.

So it was when Charter scooped up Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum)  just over a year ago. Since then, renegotiation of comScore’s agreement with Charter brought comScore from 22 million measured households to more than 35 million, according to Jeff Boehme, SVP, Television Research at comScore.

The bottom line: comScore ended up with about 75 million reportable television sets in use, giving the company greater insight into tuning behavior, Boehme explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“The importance is not just the tuning data. It’s the ability to match that tuning data with relevant audience consumer datasets so that not only can we track tuning we can track tuning we can track advertising and we can track consumption,” Boehme says.

Between its own data warehousing and relationships with companies like Experian, comScore can identify programs with high propensity of certain advertiser audience segments and match it to advertising campaigns in those programs.

“Now we can provide much more detail on the accountability of advertising, both in television as well as digital,” Boehme says.

comScore also has been on the ground floor of addressable TV advertising, given its own roots as well as those of Rentrak, with which it merged in early 2016. Early addressable players like DIRECTV and DISH relied on comScore and Rentrak to provide measurement capabilities.

One casualty of advanced audience measurement and correlation with consumer purchasers is waste, which has been a given throughout the history of TV advertising.

“Television now becomes more accountable because now what they can do is plan more effectively and deliver their segments with higher efficiencies,” Boehme says. “So no longer do we have waste factors that are standard among media buys.”

For programmers, the gains are mainly in the ability to better manage their portfolios “so the programmer understands what audiences now identified as consumers they need to attract and how.”

We interviewed Boehme at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.