“When we plan media on behalf of our clients, we don’t plan them in channel siloes. We plan across multiple screens, because that’s where media is being consumed,” Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at WPP-owned media agency Wavemaker, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “In addition to measuring the delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”
Advertisers face a key challenge as technology giants like Google and Apple take steps to protect consumer privacy. Google delayed plans to stop supporting tracking cookies in its popular Chrome web browser, but the deadline still looms. Apple has given its customers more control over device identifiers they share with third-party apps and websites.
Advertisers also have to content with a variety of “walled garden” media environments that each have proprietary consumer data. It’s not always clear whether brands are reaching the different consumers as they use Facebook, Google or Amazon – or watch video on ad-supported streaming platforms like Hulu or Peacock.
Beekman said that she’s encouraged by work on data “clean rooms” that protect consumer privacy, while also opening up the possibility of measuring how advertising is reaching different audiences. She also is optimistic about using panel data to study purchase behavior among retailers in real time, and to change campaigns mid-flight.
“Some of the challenges are: how do we include the walled gardens when they sometimes prioritize not commingling their data with other platforms?” Beekman said. “It can be difficult with digital tracking when we think about the advancements that have been made for consumer privacy.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>“If you go to more performance-savvy advertisers and performance-savvy customers, the questions are about understanding cross-screen exposures to business outcomes or KPIs that the marketer may need,” Louqman Parampath, vice president of product management – advertising, at streaming-device maker Roku, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV.
Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Parampath described the current condition of cross-screen measurement and the challenges of combining data sets from different sources.
“Most measurement partners don’t have all of these data assets and identity graph capabilities, and a methodology all buttoned up for a complete solution,” he said. “It is going to be an evolutionary improvement on how we measure, how we improve our capabilities – and how the ecosystem itself works with each other. These are different datasets, often not controlled by a single party.”
Roku in March formed a strategic alliance with TV ratings company Nielsen aimed at improving media measurement and video advertising. Roku agreed to buy Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business that includes its video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies.
The partnership included a plan to integrate complementary Nielsen ad and content measurement products into the Roku platform and advance the Nielsen One cross-media measurement solution.
“It’s a step forward for traditional TV, and opens up new ad opportunities for other programmers/sell-side, but it also opens up all the data, targeting and measurement capabilities that marketers/buy-side has historically wanted,” Parampath said. “We can bring these addressable TV exposures into this cross-screen measurement solution.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>“The screen itself hasn’t lost consumption. The TV screen has been consumed more than ever before. Where we see a shift is how we buy it,” Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at GroupM’s Wavemaker, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “For us as an industry to get a lot better, we’ve got to create the mechanisms that allow us to plan appropriately in both scenarios.”
Extending media reach while limiting wasteful spending is still the goal, and marketers have ways to measure CTV viewability with internet addresses and automatic content recognition (ACR) data on smart TVs. Still, there remains a need to link impressions with outcomes.
“We also have to think about: what did that incremental reach do for my business? If I did reach new people, great. Did they grow the base from sales?” Rinaldi said. “Those two things have not come together yet, so we have to separate church and state for now.”
Amid these rapid changes in viewing habits, measurement companies and data providers are developing solutions to track consumer exposure to advertising. Rinaldi said there still will be challenges in bringing together viewing data from different sources.
“I don’t think we’re going to see ‘perfect’ in the next couple years. That’s one of the flaws we have as a marketplace right now. We’re waiting for that perfect scenario to be measured in every single screen that we touch,” he said.
Brands need to consider the needs of their campaigns, and what they hope to learn from their measurement methods, Rinaldi said.
“When we take that approach, we won’t create perfection, but we’ll at least create this learning agenda and test-and-learn scenario,” he said.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>“People are hearing what advertisers are needing in terms of cross-screen and cross-media measurement. What I would love, though, is if we could really bring it down to a level and speak every openly about what these solutions do and don’t solve for,” Jennifer Gardner, senior director of media for North America at household goods giant Unilever, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV.
Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Gardner offered her outlook for improving cross-screen measurement. She likens the development to past efforts to measure ad viewability and to eliminate ad fraud.
“The goal of viewability was to count first so that we could then look at attribution and the tie to business. I don’t think we’ve made it there. There’s still a lot to do in the attribution space,” she said. “There’s nobody else out there who wouldn’t want to be able to buy media in an outcomes-based world, but we know there are stepping stones to get there. That’s another place where we as an industry need to hold hands and get to.”
Unilever, whose brands include Dove soap, Lipton tea and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, is working with GroupM on test cases to improve cross-screen measurement before beginning a pilot program by the end of the year.
“When I want counting, I don’t want people grading their own homework,” Gardner said. “We trust, but verify. The role of third parties is critically important.”
The growth in platforms that distribute user-generated content, such as social media and video-sharing sites, has increased the possibility that advertising appears next to objectionable content. In response, marketers have become more aware of brand safety and suitability in their ad placements. They also want to be responsible mindful of data ethics and other measures that respect consumers.
“Just because a platform, a publisher, a media seller declares a piece of content eligible for monetization doesn’t mean that we as marketers or advertisers want to be showing up in and around that content,” Gardner said. “The end goal is good experience for the consumer. It only helps all of us in the industry to continue creating good experiences for consumers because then our advertising and marketing messages have a much greater chance of breaking through.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>“The reason the panel remains critical is because we need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The combination of using the panel data with the larger data set allows us to inform person-level assignment – and with that, the ability to view co-viewing as well.”
Digital video ad exposure is important for some of the more advanced campaign-related metrics, he said. Those measurements include how often viewers saw an ad, if at all, or were overexposed to it.
The information offers “the ability to understand reach and frequency, not from a traditional perspective where we had an estimated reach and a related calculated average frequency, but instead to actually understand what I would call the deterministic reach and frequency distribution curve,” he said.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>“We want to make sure the consumer is at the center of this conversation,” said Karthik Rao, chief operating officer of TV ratings company Nielsen, in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Rao describes Nielsen’s plans to provide audience research that is meaningful to brands and their media partners.
Rao said Nielsen’s plans rest on three principles: resiliency, coverage and comparability.
“Resiliency foundationally is about adapting to…the massive changes in the privacy landscape,” he said, referring to stricter regulations to give people more control over their personal data. A resilient measurement system includes an identity capability that’s scalable and can be integrated seamlessly in a privacy-compliant way with Nielsen’s clientele.
The company also seeks to provide coverage that reflects the many ways consumers engage with content and advertising on different platforms. Comparability describes the goal of measuring deduplicated audiences.
Nielsen last year announced a plan to launch Nielsen One as a single, cross-media solution for more comparable and comprehensive metrics across platforms. The company will introduce the single measurement service in the fourth quarter of next year, as it seeks to transition the industry to cross-media metrics by the fall 2024 season.
The coronavirus pandemic led companies to ensure the personal safety of their employees with work-from-home arrangements that limited physical interaction with others. Those steps to protect workers hindered Nielsen research that relies on personal interviews with members of its consumer panel.
“The panel ultimately fuels a lot of the measurement capabilities that we provide clients. We saw a little bit of erosion in the ratings,” Rao said. “More importantly than the actual erosion is the lack of clarity as to what is going to happen when we go back into homes.”
In developing Nielsen One as a single currency for measuring audiences, the company is seeking the insights from media buyers and sellers to avoid favoritism. Nielsen has partnered with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) to develop cross-media standards.
“We don’t want to try to help the industry this time by only listening to one constituency,” Rao said. “As part of our engagement program, we put together special committee groups…with representation from all constituencies. We want to get this right this time.”
Sweeney agreed that an identity solution is fundamental to media planning and buying, giving advertisers a way to harness their first-party data and information from other sources.
“Within this context, it starts with an identity. We come back to understanding who those individuals are that we, on behalf of marketing partners, want to reach,” he said. “It is about reach and frequency, but it’s also about the impact of that reach and frequency…Having a currency across all of these different touchpoints is also vital.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the cross-screen measurement track presented by Nielsen:
Marketers face bigger challenges in measuring media consumption among different viewing devices, including mobile phones and smart TVs, to get a more unified view of consumers. The goal is to marry bottom-up measurement that’s common among digital advertisers with top-down modeling, said Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Brands have access to troves of data about how their ads were delivered, but measuring their effectiveness on consumers takes another level of research. TV ratings company Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population.
“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” said Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at Nielsen. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.”
Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, agrees that panel information is critical for in-depth insights.
“The reason the panel remains critical is that you need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” he said.
“In addition to measuring delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it or that we shouldn’t try to evolve that measurement,” said Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at Wavemaker.
Measuring impact includes an analysis of how different media touchpoints help brands to achieve their objectives in terms of sales, awareness and brand consideration.
“It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content,” said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence. “We’re at the early stages of developing measurement solutions that really help us understand that into the media model.”
There’s room for experimentation in achieving results as measurement will never achieve a “perfect” level of insights, said Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at Wavemaker, GroupM
“We won’t have perfect, but we have to come at this from the lens of what is the best option for this campaign,” he said.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>
“The lines between what traditionally has been referred to as ‘television’ or ‘digital’ are becoming increasingly blurred,” Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at ratings company Nielsen, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you are an advertiser and you’re trying to reach your consumer in the most effective way possible, you really need insight that spans across all platforms where a consumer can be reached — not so much looking at data in the siloes of the past.”
Amid these rapid changes in viewing habits, Nielsen last year announced a plan to launch Nielsen One as a single, cross-media solution for more comparable and comprehensive metrics across platforms. The company will introduce the single measurement service in the fourth quarter of next year, as it seeks to transition the industry to cross-media metrics by the fall 2024 season.
“What we envision as part of Nielsen One is a cross-media solution that will allow people to make bigger and better decisions based on a holistic view of the consumer,” Gilberti said.
Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population. Its information sources include return path data from set-top boxes, automatic content recognition (ACR) data from smart TVs and census-level data from different services in connected TV.
“All of that data by definition wasn’t built inherently for measurement,” Gilberti said. “What we’re able to do with the Nielsen panel is to calibrate and adjust that data to correct for any biases and any efficiencies.”
While there are many sources of data, they don’t provide a holistic view of consumer habits. For example, a set-top box may provide about a particular device in a home, but not reflect over-the-air viewing, Gilberti said. Media planning has become more difficult as a result.
“You end up with quite a lot of waste today, and as a consumer, you probably can think of instances where you’ve been served the same ad way, way too many times,” Gilberti said. “The challenge in managing that frequency and eliminating waste comes down to understanding your audience and how they consume media.”
The Nielsen panel is representative of all U.S. TV households, based on census data that include age, gender, race, ethnicity and household size. The panel provides a source of truth for comparisons with other data sets, and helps to fill in the gaps among them.
“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” Gilberti said. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.”
Improving the media ecosystem requires tackling ad fraud and enhancing measurement methods to help understand consumer engagement with media, Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
Weeding out fake ad inventory is a necessary step in tackling ad fraud, especially as programmatic buying continues to grow.
“The platforms that are connecting those sellers into our environments have a direct path to understanding who the real suppliers are and who aren’t,” Gerber said. “They’re ultimately cutting checks to those sellers, and should be able to vet them in a more proactive way.”
Improving the media supply chain also requires a better understanding of whether consumers are actually seeing ads, especially as they spend more time with connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones.
“The big question there is whether the screen that’s being consumed — that that content is being cast to or delivered to — is actually tuned into that viewing source,” Gerber said. “There’s potentially a lot of viewing or ad delivery that’s being captured that isn’t real. We need to make sure we have measurement solutions in place that truly identify whether that’s happening and to what extent.”
Advertisers and their agencies are in the early stages of developing ways to better measure viewability and engagement.
“The general premise of viewability needs to be something that we continue to focus on, and evolve,” Gerber said. “It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content.”