It’s commonly expressed as how does digital media complement or overlap reach, Hogue, who is SVP of Digital Client Solutions, says in this Beet.TV interview at the FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan this week.
“Having brought more measurement and more metrics to market, we’re helping media sellers to package that data in new ways that follow the consumer,” says Hogue. “That helps media sellers to put together that audience in a way that is consistent and comparable across those experiences. And on the buy side it helps them have a consistent set of measures that walk across.”
One of Nielsen’s more recent contributions to the cause was adding YouTube to its Total Ad Ratings, which was announced in January. It enables advertisers to determine whether their ads are reaching people on TV and mobile devices, as MediaPost reports.
“That’s a huge deal because of the size and scope of YouTube,” Hogue adds. “And being able to have that covered in our measurement component was important for advertisers, again to be able to see the full impact of their digital exposure.”
Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings are hardly new, but “we’re continuing to see the demand for them and for more uses in terms of showing where digital is incremental or complementary to traditional television.”
Metrics like reach and frequency and duration are fundamental “to pretty much any other business decision that you’re going to make,” says Hogue. Among other things, they help to inform the “next level of decision making,” for example when and how to move into addressable TV.
She cites CFlight as a means of packaging data in a way that “helps NBCU be able to go to market in a different way that sort of releases us from the constraints of a C3, C7 model and allows us to bring more data into that equation.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The end goal is “how you can get a holistic view from television viewing across the same audiences across different platforms into one place so you can offer video viewing to the buyers in a more holistic fashion,” Clarken adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.
Nielsen has been working the industry on cross-platform measurement “and it’s been complicated.” Signs of encouragement, according to Clarken, include the “fantastic job” that Linda Yaccarino and her team have created in the form of CFlight.
Within CFlight, Nielsen provides foundational data from its traditional television ratings plus Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings “as the underlying data, and then they put those things together inside of this platform. It’s great. It’s a place where it’s a starting point,” says Clarken.
“I think it’s great for the industry. It shows movement across a problem that’s been there for some time where there hasn’t been movement. We’d love to continue to work with them and see how this can be adopted more broadly.”
She considers calculating cross-platform reach and frequency as “the first place to start. How many people saw it, how often did they see it, how long did they see it for. And that provides an underlying platform for everything else.
“And what’s really important is that when you measure reach and frequency across platforms you’re doing it in a comparable way. Buyers want holistic view. They don’t want to try to cobble together their TV data with the data from mobile, with the data from PC, with data from multiple providers to try to get some sense of their ad spend on video themselves.”
As more advertisers extend their audience targeting beyond age and gender into different demographics and biographics, the next step is to show actual business outcomes.
“You have to start with the base before you can get to the sales targets, but ultimately the holy grail is to put the base in place and then start to building the pieces on top of that to the ultimate outcome. Which is did I actually sell something on the back of my advertising,” says Clarken.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>CFlight was launched in the spring of 2017 to enable holistic video planning across platforms by measuring all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions. It initially was available for solely for NBC’s primetime and sports programming, Vazirani, who is EVP, Insights & Measurement for NBCU, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“Going into next year we will expand it across the portfolio, and we’re working through how do we make it less friction with the systems and what are the investments we need to make from an operations perspective to make this easier across the portfolio,” says Vazirani.
In addition to facilitating cross-platform planning, CFlight also was intended to “raise the bar on digital and provide guarantees on completed views” while providing a new way for NBCU to maximize ad inventory and yield portfolio-wide. “It was really a mechanism to deliver on our vision to measure across all screens, all platforms and have a unified impression measurement approach.”
She stresses the open source, transparent nature of CFlight’s methodology. After considering “many different partners,” including Comscore, Adobe and VideoAmp, NBCU chose Nielsen’s C3 and C7 TV ratings and its Digital Advertising Ratings for digital media.
“We know we’ll evolve it in the future, but the key was that this is open source and we are very transparent with our methodology.
According to Vazirani, marketers thought CFlight was “conceptually fantastic” at the outset and that agencies were also excited. She cites Simulmedia’s adoption of CFlight two months ago as it added OTT inventory to its campaigns as additional validation. But systems remain a challenge.
“We’re still on some of our older billing systems. How do we transform from an operations perspective to now report on it holistically and how does an agency ecosystem transform from that?”
In the meantime, NBCU is building “a continuum of measurement” from unifying impressions with CFlight being able to assign credit to television and providing marketers with a closed-loop evaluation of their campaign and, eventually, a series of campaigns.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Core pillars of that cadence are measurement, commercial innovation and technology, The Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent EGTA Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018.
The goal behind NBCU’s State of the Industry Forum could be boiled down to one element, according to Yaccarino. “Our behavior, processes, do not reflect consumer behavior as they exist today.”
She uses the word “fatigued” to describe the sentiment that existed within NBCU because the company was certain that “advertising is likely to change more in the next five years than it’s changed in the last fifty. We needed a reset.”
On the measurement side, Yaccarino says nothing has changed in more than a decade. “Think about consumer behavior and we could use measurement just as one example. The iPad didn’t even exist.”
Last April, NBCU developed the all-screen measurement currency called CFlight because “we couldn’t wait any more so we decided we’ve got to do it ourselves.” CFlight measures all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every platform, as Advertising Age reports.
“The good news is, other companies are starting to adopt that CFlight measurement,” Yaccarino adds.
NBCU has been promoting its contextual intelligence platform, which matches specific ads to specific programming, another step toward commercial innovation. “We’re able to marry the content that is contextually connected to our advertisers’ commercials. It’s the first scaled tool that we’re able to offer the advertisers.”
Asked about her expectations for CES 2019, Yaccarino says her activity will include giving clients “a performance report” that encompasses things like CFlight and PRIME PODs, which reduced clutter by 20%. “Show them that our hunch was right and it’s working, and it’s working really well.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
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