For nearly 10 years the industry has been aware of the challenge of “needing to do something different and better,” Rockwood explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. “I think in the last two we’ve probably made a lot of progress. I think before then there wasn’t enough of a business need but now there certainly is and I think there has been a lot better progress.”

The SVP of Ad Sales Portfolio Research says of Comscore and Nielsen, “I think that they both have started to do more that’s actually helping us” while echoing the concerns of many CIMM participants about the need to make it easier to conduct business in cross-platform premium video.

“It’s just too hard. As this measurement improves it will become easier to transact.”

She describes the fragmentation of viewing options as “so extreme that it may not be the best thing for the consumer. So I do believe that they’re going to start looking for simpler solutions that provide more value” And while the marketplace is fragmented is now, it’s “going to coalesce around some solutions that actually have more consumer value.”

Asked whether there are too many measurement options for the sell-side, Rockwood doesn’t think so. “I think you have to have competition in this marketplace and you have two major companies that are trying to solve for this,” both of which are “getting traction.”

Beyond that competition is the disparity in data sets, whether they derive from an MVPD or in Turner’s case DirecTV and NBCU with Comcast that “can all be used in different ways and I think we’re finding our way through that now. I don’t think that the complexity is getting in the way of us doing business.”

On the subject of identity graphs, Rockwood stresses their importance in how video advertising and viewing related to individual households and individuals.

“Having high-quality information around what devices belong to which households and then which people are using those devices is I think really important,” Rockwood says. “I think that the Xander data will certainly give us a leg up in that race.”

The latter was evident at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. Referring to a panel discussion on cross-platform standards, ARF Chief Research Officer Paul Donato says in this interview with Beet.TV, “It was a nice polite session. It showed some of the sort of two sides of the story. We’re pretty close to all the members and it’s really quite controversial.”

One aspect of cross-platform measurement in particular divides digital players from those in linear television. “There are some mostly in the digital space that feel like there should be no real time duration, waiting, and are very much against it,” Donato explains. Those in the traditional linear TV space “who typically have longer ads tend to support the standards as they exist right now.”

The ARF will be working with its members on research that “goes right to should it be a linear waiting for time or is it non linear? I personally believe that the impact of advertising is non linear, which means eight seconds is not quite as good as four seconds, but the first four seconds have more value than the next four seconds.”

On the attribution side, there are anywhere from 15 to 30 attribution providers “all using different models,” says Donato. “I will say that what concerns a number in the industry is actually understanding the models and how they actually work and how to actually validate those models.”

He cites a common scenario wherein an attribution company will present to the CMO of a marketer, who then typically asks in-house researchers whether they understand how the company’s offering works. “A lot of what CIMM does and much of what we’ll do moving forward in 2019 is to actually study those models and try to understand the biases associated with them.”

Some CIMM attendees feel that progress is being made on cross-platform measurement, for which companies like Nielsen and Comscore received “soft compliments.” Because a lot of viewing is coming off of linear television and moving to other places, “it’s not surprising that the programmers are concerned that there’s still what they’ve been calling blind spots, places which are not part of the measurement system,” Donato says. “It’s really important to the media that all of those tiny pockets of non measurement be measured. That’s the stress that you see. Every percentage of inventory counts just given the value of that inventory.”

A year from now, he’d like the ARF to have achieved a better understanding of attribution models, partly to determine whether “a lot of the attribution models really disadvantage upper funnel media, because we don’t have that sort of granular data for individuals in television. So I hope we understand if, in fact, upper-funnel media are biased by these models.”

Much of the in-depth studies that FreeWheel has done to on the impact of creative have centered on program promotions, Marcus explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. This is because there’s more variance in the absence of having to deal with issues like talent rights.

“So you have a lot more versions that tie to the different episodes and you can see the impact over time,” says Marcus, who is GM of FreeWheel’s Data Platform. “When you look at the impact of creative from that perspective, you get insights that are almost impossible to gain by just looking at the creative.”

Even an art director or a producer looking at the two pieces of promotion might say “these look solid. But when you do the attribution, which is really an aggregated analysis based on millions of homes, you can discern the fact that one of the promos actually had an outsized impact.

“It might have been because it didn’t wear out as much or because it had an emotional connection that the other one didn’t,” Marcus adds. “To the untrained and certainly even to the trained eye, you might not have been able to understand that by just looking at the creative.”

A lot of attribution today doesn’t even take into account the difference in creative, partly because so many campaigns rely on a single creative iteration. “So the attribution solutions have not focused too much on having different creative, and even when you have different creative, there’s another layer to this, which is it’s not just which creative wins.”

It may be that different creatives are better suited for different types of audiences. So with a program promotion for a romantic comedy, the more romantic version of the promo may work better with women while the more comedic part may work better with men.

FreeWheel began its research with linear television attribution “because we thought that was the biggest gap. Billions and billions of impressions on linear TV that were not being properly credited for their impact in terms of effectiveness and their contribution to the marketing performance,” Marcus explains. The company is now expanding that to include both linear and cross-platform addressable TV.

Because creative may have a different impact with different segments, sub-segments or context, “the digital side, the addressable side, allows you more flexibility in being able to act on those insights than the linear side. At the end of the day, even if I have a romantic comedy, no matter where I place it I’m not going to be getting a one hundred percent romance focus or a one hundred percent comedic focus. But when I’m in an addressable context, I can have the right creative with the right context targeting the right segment or sub segment,” says Marcus.

“I think there’s a ton of innovation, inventions, a lot of granular data in the marketplace,” Subramanyam says in this interview with Beet.TV at the CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit. “But I think we need to take a step back. I think we need to hit the pause button for a second and ask what we’re really trying to solve for.”

Subramanyam, who participated in a panel discussion titled Deduplicating Reach for Content & Ads: End Users Discuss Solutions from Comscore & Nielsen, hints at the role CBS might play in moving things along. “I think you have to wait a little bit for that. I think we will publicize that soon, but you should know that a lot of deep thinking is going into this because these are critical questions and we believe time is critical for leadership,” says Subramanyam.

As both a media company and a marketer, CBS wants data to “somehow speak to each other and to fit together. I can’t have different data sources telling me different stories. I’m a marketer and I produce premium content as a company and I need my advertising measurement as well as my consumer measurement to fit together and not be on two different paths.”

Addressing the “larger theme in America” of direct-to-consumer brands, Subramanyam notes that CBS is no stranger to that concept between CBS All Access and Showtime.

“A direct relationship with the consumer so you can understand them better and really super serve them is important, and that’s as true of the Super Bowl as the Grammys as it is of Star Trek,” she says.

Asked for her views on cross-screen measurement, she stresses what CBS knows about its viewers. “Is there one person out there who adds it all up and gives it to me? Absolutely not. That being said, we have a very, very good handle.”

She believes the “insights function” at major media companies has become more critical than ever. “Because we are among the few people who have a full view as to what’s going on in the ecosystem and I would certainly say we understand our audiences very, very well.”

Subramanyam doesn’t think one-to-one marketing is necessary because not every consumer needs to be reached on a one-to-one basis. “Not everyone needs to be spoken to as an individual, and also creative can’t be produced for a single person. But I think thinking of groups of people and using the best in class identity solutions and identity data to do that is a good thing.”

Overall, Giacosa says in this interview with Beet.TV at the CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit, “I think we are still solving problems that we probably should have already cracked. But as an industry there are challenges with getting all of that data to live in the same space, with walled gardens over here and set-top box data being over there.”

Giacosa, who is EVP, Global Managing Director, Head, Data, Technology, Analytics & Insights, acknowledges the need to build scale and reach across platforms that are still somewhat siloed. “We’re getting some of the data signals, but it will be so much more powerful when we bring all of those together,” she says.

Having participated in the CIMM session titled TV Attribution Takes Center Stage, Giacosa thinks “there’s no doubt that TV drives other media as well. Certainly in the models that we do at Spark Foundry,” which include POEM—Paid, Owned and Earned Media mix models.

“What that does is it looks at not only the TV attribution and the direct plays but also the indirect plays it has on other media,” she explains. “When something happens in TV, what was the impact on paid social, search, in-store or website?” Bringing those elements together helps to avoid marking “dark decisions on what to reinvest in or take out of the mix.”

Spark Foundry, which is part of Publicis Media, also incorporates brand equity data for a baseline not only of sales performance but in “how we can get to be more fast moving in terms of how we look at brand equity as well. I’m very fearful oftentimes that people follow ROI off of a cliff” because the focus typically is short-term results.

Advertisers also need to think about content and “those longer-term, brand-building investments that we make to then look at the long-term return on ROI as well by building that hybrid of a model that looks at the ROI plus brand equity” and, finally, de-duplicated reach and frequency.

Asked about the subject of identity graphs, she prefers to see a move toward a “meta graph” given, among other things, the impact that the General Data Protection Regulation has had in Europe. “What we’re already starting to see in Vermont, in L.A. and other places within the United States is they’re following that path too.”

Giacosa predicts we will see “GDPR-esque within the United States fairly soon.”