That is the key question which has suddenly engulfed the craft of TV measurement, as Nielsen’s admission it may not have measured pandemic TV audiences as well as beforehand has caused TV execs to worry audiences may be as much as 10% under-reported.

Amid the kerfuffle, rival Comscore senses an opportunity.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comscore’s chief revenue officer Carol Hinnant says a new deal inked with ViacomCBS shows TV networks are coming to value the approach of panel-informed measurement over panel-dependent measurement.

Measurement debate

As their ratings drop, TV networks fault Nielsen. Media researchers weigh in https://t.co/IKPhO22Z5N pic.twitter.com/h9P9RP5sAJ

— Forbes (@Forbes) April 21, 2021

“The controversy in the marketplace today is that, on a panel-based approach you’re dealing with a small sample, and you’re having to project that to the viewing behaviours,” Hinnant says.

“I think that given the sample, and the ability to recruit during the pandemic it’s caused a lot of controversy. I think that the pandemic has certainly emphasised to the marketplace the value of (TV) return-path data.

“What Comscore does, which is very different, is that we have secured return-path (viewing) data from set-top boxes for wired households, and we ingest that data. It’s our ‘massive and passive’ form of measurement that really is propelling the industry to look at Comscore as a currency.

“One in three television households in the US are contributing passive measurement. We are not asking for participation, and we’re not looking for button-pushing, we are collecting that data in a passive way, and that’s a very different approach than the panel-based approach.”

ViacomCBS extends

To prove her point, Hinnant points to news this week in which ViacomCBS an expanded renewal agreement to use Comscore’s national TV measurement currency for its news, entertainment and sports networks, enabling ViacomCBS to guarantee its traditional linear advertising campaigns.

“It’s the first time that a major media company has actually come out and said now they have currency diversity,” Hinannt says.

“There’s a choice in television measurement, and it’s not just Nielsen anymore, and Comscore is playing a huge role in that.

“The announcement here is really about Comscore reaching parity with Nielsen in terms of television measurement.”

Counting views

During the pandemic, the widespread assumption was that television viewing boomed as stay-at-home consumers swelled consumption.

That is why TV networks, flanked by their Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) representative body, recently criticized Nielsen for reporting a decline in viewing and usage during the 2020 period.

VAB complained that the number of households providing usable data to its people meter between February 2020 and February 2021 fell considerably, leading to an under-counting of true TV viewing.

Nielsen says it will continue to be scrutinized by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) but not by auditor Ernst & Young as requested by VAB.

The apparent under-measurement dropped a problem onto TV networks’ laps as they went into a critical upfront ad sales season. Concerned TV networks are now seen as exploring additional solutions.

Measurement methods

Comscore has seized on the debate.

In a blog post and lengthy analysis, it says “small samples today are extremely unstable”:

“The dynamics of panel refusal have almost certainly changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when empanelment requires in-home interviews or installation.

“Thus, even if there may have been some attempt to understand the effect of nonparticipation bias before 2020, in the pandemic and post-pandemic worlds those conclusions, particularly for methods that include in-home visits, are now largely inapplicable.”

Nate made fun of me b/c I got excited about getting the Nielsen rating survey we got tru TV fans will kno pic.twitter.com/PXJFdV15GN

— Candi(ce) (@notmaeby) April 20, 2021

we’re informed by panels

“TV as we know it will never be the same, and neither will its currency,” Carol Hinnant, chief revenue officer of Comscore, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “With the move to impressions, addressable fits more into the cross-platform view.”

Fifty-four percent of TV households in the U.S., or 64 million in total, can be reached with addressable advertising, according to VAB. The trade group forecast that spending on addressable advertising will rise 33% to $3.37 billion this year as brands seek to refine their targeting of TV households. Addressable advertising lets them show different ads to different households during the same programming.

Source: VAB

Comscore in January will begin offering measurement of TV households as part of a ground-breaking collaboration with Comcast, one of the biggest multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) in the U.S. The companies in February announced a partnership to improve measurement with TV set-top boxes equipped to gather return path data (RPD) about viewing habits. Comcast previously had been very guarded about its valuable trove of TV viewer information.

“It’s the last hurdle to get to a true census-like measurement — having every major MVPD in the country provide return path data into our measurement,” Hinnant said. “That really is changing the marketplace.”

Outside the U.S., Comscore is expanding its footprint to measure connected TV (CTV) households in Europe as part of a recently announced partnership with Samba TV, a provider of cross-screen TV data and analytics.

Technological Challenges

Creating a common currency for media presents a variety of technological challenges, but the value of improved measurement far outweigh the shorter-term costs. It also will upend common metrics like C3, which researcher Nielsen introduced C3 in 2007 to measure average commercial minutes in live programming and playback by digital video recorders (DVRs) up to three days later.

“One of the biggest challenges for the programmers is the under-addressed piece of addressable,” Hinnant said. “If you get the addressed house going in, but the rest of the market received the standard linear ad, that is breaking the C3 measurement that is the currency today. As we move forward with an impression-based currency, it is much more likely that Comscore will be able to produce that measurement with the same precision that we produce exact commercial ratings today.”

Advertisers can expect to see more opportunities to reach targeted audiences and measure the results more precisely, especially as advertising video on-demand (AVOD) services like Hulu, Peacock, Pluto TV and Tubi grow more popular. With consumers only willing to spend so much on subscription video on demand (SVOD) services like Netflix and Disney+ that don’t carry ads, they’ll look for more free programming on AVOD platforms.

“The AVOD services are growing at a faster pace than the paid SVOD services,” Hinnant said. “That gives a lot of faith to the advertising industry that we’re still connected. Content always will be king.”

This video is part of Advancing Toward a Common TV Measurement Currency, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comscore. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

But the emerging focus on “attribution” and “outcomes” doesn’t come as easy as it sounds.

“Data is not sexy,” Hinnant says, in this Beet Retreat townhall interview. “It’s really a tough business. And the more you have, the more that you know that, Hey, there’s more work to be done to clean it up and to make it usable and intelligible in order to make business decisions off of it.

“So there’s a lot of datasets out there, a lot of closed loops, a lot of people coming out and saying, ‘Hey, we have measurement’. But it’s really trying to figure out, ‘How do you decipher that and how do you aggregate it, bring it together so it can be actionable data at a large scale?’

“It’s one thing to do outcome-based measurement. It’s another thing to say, ‘Okay, now I’m going to take that outcome and I’m going to plan and try to optimise off of them’.”

At the same event, 605’s Noah Levine also said much of attribution is a “house of cards” due to insufficient focus on data provenance.

Hinnant was in January promoted to chief revenue officer after working in national ad sales for Comscore.

Comscore merged with TV measurement firm Rentrak in 2016, creating a company with capabilities across both TV and online channels.

Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.

The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But new advances mean the TV networks which historically run over the operators can also now offer equivalent functionality.

“Up until today, addressable has been an MVPD or connected TV provider alone. That is their resource,” says Comscore’s Carol Hinnant in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And so networks really couldn’t participate at that, at a television level.

“There is a great interest in to be able to participate in national addressable. Now with Project OAR, with Nielsen’s beta that’s going on with their acquisition of Sorenson and with Xandr’s national addressable consortium, they’re allowing those minutes to come into their pool (of inventory).”

• Project OAR is aa consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising.
• Nielsen’s beta test sees a number of networks dynamically swap-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds for their advertisers.
• Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.

Hinnant added: “We have the one-to-one relationship with the MVPDs that are providing us the return path data and so we have second-by-second click stream data from that return path and we are able to have the ad placement delivered to us.”

“So, whether it’s a five second, you know, a 30 second or 60 second ad, we’re putting a precise measurement to that directly from the input from the MVPDs.”

Hinnant was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

The panel titled Making Identity a Reality in a Multi-Screen World brought together Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media.

Moderator Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting, kicked things off by asking about the much desired “leap forward” from household to individual person addressability.

“I think we’re still in the early days of that as an industry,” said Krepsik, who believes the quest for a curated, omni-channel experience rests on “insuring that we have that common view of an individual person, regardless the screen or the device that they’re watching content on.”

No one seems to think that’s on the immediate horizon. Hinnant touted the actionable nature of household data, saying, “We’ve had great progress with it. I think it does come to scale at that point.” When used at scale, “it actually proves to have better results.”

Asked to quantify where the industry stands on achieving true one-to-one targeting and suggest a wish list of improvements, Ivins said that while for TV advertising spending “flat is the new up,” digital has been going up for 25 years.

“We should have seen it coming. What were we thinking? I think the industry is now woken up to that,” Ivins said. “All the media owners, they have the reach,” but that alone isn’t not enough.

“NBC can reach almost any household in the country if they wanted to because of their portfolio of products, but they don’t have the first-party relationships or some of technology. And the distributors have the technology and first-party relationships but they don’t have the reach,” Ivins added.

“TV as a platform, we have to get there,” said Hinnant. “We’ve got to stop the silos that are merging and I get that data privacy is an issue on that. But if we can come together as a platform, then we could actually compete.”

Five years ago, technology was a common barrier to advancement, according to Krepsit. Now cooperation is a bigger hurdle.

“The hardware manufacturers are beginning to play a bigger and bigger role in this ecosystem as well,” he said. “So it’s moving beyond the set-top box and actually moving to the actual devices. I think it’s only going to get more complicated.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

It seems likely there won’t be one central identity graph for each person judging from comments by Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media at the forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World. The panel was moderated by Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting.

“If you don’t have consumer trust, it does not matter what technology solutions we put in place, the device graphs, the different partnerships, or any sort of math or data science we put behind it,” said Krepsik.

He cited regulations like GDPR in the European Union and the nascent California privacy act known as CPPA as being guiding forces. “I think just throwing technology and math at a problem without actually winning the trust of consumers sets our industry back,” Krepsik added.

Hinnant agreed with Krepsik and underscored the need to move beyond rating points to audiences in media transactions. “We have to help that conversion for all the ecosystem to go through and it’s the identity graph that helps that or the panels that help do that,” said Hinnant.

Prohaska mentioned the sharing of user phone numbers by Facebook without consent as one extreme, while observing that many people have been satisfied with a value proposition that involves the use of their data. “We’re in a bifurcated world,” he said.

“You have some people that will go one way and maybe a vast majority to the other,” said Hinnant. “But if we can help communicate what the value is to the consumer and educate them on what it means to be able to protect their privacy, I think that would be helpful.”

Ivins related the frustration of having to provide his credit card number while buying an airplane ticket online from a company with which he had done business before. “What do you mean you don’t store my credit card? I’ve been doing this for so long. It’s one of these things that you want to know who has what.”

With regard to Facebook and other digital advertising giants, Ivins said “there’s a message being sent there” by a backlash characterized by a decline in user engagement. “Whether they listen to it or not is TBD.”

From NCC’s perspective, “One of the issues that we’re looking at is I don’t want to be single threaded through one ID graph. I think that’s dangerous,” said Ivins about relying on one company. “I think we need to have some flexibility in that situation.”

Krepsik talked about people regardless of age or gender having to watch commercials for erectile disfunction products.

“What’s the biggest differentiation between me and my daughter? I’m a male, she’s a female. My son, he’s ten now. He doesn’t really even need to see an erectile dysfunctional ad at the age of ten. So you need his age.”

There needs to be a foundation that provides “a view of real people to underpin that measurement to build trust,” Krepsik said. “You can’t just live with one identity graph. We have different sources of information around people, around persons. And so it does have to be persons-based, but more importantly it has to be distributed. There’s not going to be a magical decoder ring where all the data’s going to sit in one spot.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Comscore’s seat at the table was its “data-centric, panel-informed” data assets across digital media, TV and OTT, according to Carol Hinnant, who is EVP, National Television Sales. “We bring that together in a single-source panel and then we really use that to drive our outcomes,” says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.

NBCU had the benefit of data from Fandango, the movie ticket business of which it is majority owner. STXFilms was guaranteed that NBCU and its Audience Studio team would produce ticket sales and searches for information about the movie, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

With Comscore’s matching its digital and TV data with Fandango’s data, “those outcomes were based on Fandango ticket sales and online searches for the film. So we really were able to tie that entire marketing ecosystem and have it be outcome based on how we actually drove that,” says Hinnant.

Asked by interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., how agencies and marketers manage to bring together all the data needed for outcomes-based campaigns, Hinnant says “it really takes a collective effort of everybody.” She cites Comscore’s relationships with such third-party data providers as Polk, Experian and IRI.

“We also invite first-party data to come in. In the case of Universal, they brought in their Fandango data set, we did a match on that.”

So what is required to reach a tipping point of sorts for similar campaigns? “I think that you have to get the ecosystem to be able to accept those outcomes. So it’s not only just looking at those audiences but you have to have that be able to flow through the whole planning and posting cycle and we’re starting to see more and more of that happen.”

Although planning based on outcomes is “at kind of a small scale today,” Hinnant observes that Viacom is “winning with their advanced audiences structure so I think we’ll see more and more of that as these media networks and publishers have more success with that.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?

Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.

But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?

A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…

TV is the same – and different

Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…

Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:

“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.

“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”

But TV is fragmenting

Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.

Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”

Advertisers want ‘TV’, but like digital

From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…

Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights

“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.

“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”

Addressable TV hard to scale

The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…

Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:

“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.

“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.

“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”

But beware excess scale

But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”

Measurement needs metadata

Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…

Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:

“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.

“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

When brands bring data to Comscore, it matches that information through privacy complaint manners to the viewing behaviors generated by its cross-platform data sets. “I think that is the misnomer of when people say ‘I want to bring this first-party data. You have to then have all of the rights in order to match that,” Hinnant explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.

“I do think that is something that needs to be verified and Comscore plays a big role in that we can make sure that it’s matched in the same way,” Hinnant adds. “We can verify to any agency or brand that wants to come in that this is how we match the data and this is the sizing of that particular segment and this is what was delivered.”

Asked for her thoughts about OpenAP, the audience targeting consortium created by Fox, Turner and Viacom, she sees it as one of the answers to the industry challenge of removing friction in the marketplace. Comscore’s advanced audiences was one of the first data sources integrated into the new system.

“I think that the partners have done a good job to pool their inventory and allow any marketer to come in and say, ‘Yes this the segment I want to trade on and this is the pool of inventory.’ So it does make that process easier.”

According to Hinnant, advertisers ranging from American Express to Universal Pictures are trading in the OpenAP system, “so I think those are great at-bats and great starts. I think there needs to be more inventory available. Comscore’s just happy to be playing in that universe.”

To thread the needle of varying players all seeking to harness more data for consumer targeting, Comscore is “beholden to all of our verticals. The MVPD’s have put us in business through their delivery of data that we manage for them, set-top box and return path data,” Hinnant notes. “We look at all of our partners across the digital ecosystems and then our own panel information” to deliver a cohesive measurement system that’s useful. We’re trying to help provide the solutions to our customer base.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

But the proliferation of consumer devices – from phones and tablets, to consoles and connected TVs – has changed all that.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, comScore national TV sales SVP Carol Hinnant explains how the company has upgraded its cross-platform media measurement – and what’s coming next.

“We have invested in a total home panel,” Hinnant says.” It’s the first time that comScore has invested in data from hardware – it is a meter device that is installed in homes we’ve recruited to be part of the panel.

“It goes in to their WiFi router, to pick up all activity in a household – and we mean all activity.  It picks up Internet Of Things in addition to gaming devices and streaming and sticks and everything you can think of.”

Specifically, comScore has installed the hardware in 12,500 homes, giving it sight of around 150,000 consumer digital devices when at home.

The quest? To understand where modern audiences are spending their time.

The router-based panel is in addition to comScore’s far larger general panel.

And comScore bundles its cross-platform media measurement in to two offerings – Xmedia and ExtendedTV, a new product due to launch that will specifically measure TV content across an array of screens.

In testing for a year, Hinnant says ExtendedTV will launch this Q2 or Q3.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas.   The series is sponsored by Ooyala.  For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.