“We are in the process of working with our partners to evaluate and validate these [measurement methods],” Bharad Ramesh, executive director of research and investment analytics at WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of these are modeled out using third-party data or they’re first-party data, and we need to check the validity of those data sets.”

He said there are discrepancies in data about viewership, including different automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to measure reach on smart TVs. Measuring ad attribution can vary by industry, especially for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands that many consumers buy at brick-and-mortar stores.

“Closing the loop is definitely a challenge, and that’s something that keeps us busy to try to solve for with our partners,” Ramesh said. “In today’s environment, there is no one partner who can solve identity across everything.”

Walled garden media environments like social networks and streaming platforms that each have their own data sets can make cross-screen measurement more difficult. Ramesh said the industry is working toward solving for identity in the next year.

“There are many different ways to do it, and we are diving into this year right now,” he said. “The way we define premium content and the way we define where video ads appear – it’s expanding, driven by the supply and demand issues we have.”

Advertisers are developing strategies for their “media stack” – or the mix of channels they use including traditional linear TV, streaming and digital video – to reach audiences. Many streaming platforms also have smaller ad loads than traditional linear TV, giving brands an opportunity to stand out.

“For every two impressions you’re losing of linear, you may have the opportunity to get one back with streaming, because 50% of streaming is not ad-supported,” Ramesh said. “The ones that are ad-supported also limit the inventory that’s available for advertising. It’s not a like-for-like replacement right now.”

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