But, before it can get there, the technology will have to overcome in-built identity-tracking deficiencies at a time when some of the digital ad industry’s foremost identity technologies are disappearing.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jessica Hogue, Innovid GM for Measurement & Analytics, explains what will happen.

Cookie-less TV

Third-party tracking cookies are being deprecated whilst tech vendors are also tightening up on advertiser user of other device identifiers.

For Hogue, and the whole of connected TV, however, that is familiar territory, because many CTV devices don’t support system-level identifiers like cookies anyway.

“It’s cookie-less by nature,” she says. “Cookies don’t operate in the connected TV environment. So the future really looks to having much more of a modern approach that allows for those principles of privacy and interoperability.

“I think that that includes a mix of panels and different integration of different, whether it’s identity or first party data.”

Rip and replace?

That makes CTV the canary in the mineshaft for the big change that is happening in digital advertising – the move from tracking mechanisms like cookies toward more of an opted-in use of real audience data.

Across the industry, vendors are rushing to offer stand-in solutions in a world of disappearing cookies. But Hogue doesn’t think the idea of “repeal and replace” is the optimum one.

“When there’s a leak, you want to rush to fill it,” she accepts. “So that was perfectly understandable. But, I think as an industry, we’re not really serving the market at the end of the day by just slapping a Band-Aid on what is becoming really a broader issue.

“I don’t think that we’ll see the emergence of a new single standard that becomes the de facto, if you will. I think this has been a lesson that has some frailties. So what we see is more of a means to having a system of layers of identity that can be connected.”

Personalised TV ads

So Hogue, and others like her, believe that, instead, the industry will move to adapt all manner of practices and technologies that put independence, privacy compliance, privacy respect and interoperability at the heart of audience identification.

For Innovid’s part, it offers a household-level ID built on its ad-serving platform, recording viewing behavior of individual services at the device level and then clustering them into that household identifier.

It’s the sort of practice Hogue thinks will ultimately enable personalized advertising, and has already allowed marketers to be more responsive during the pandemic, on a location-by-location basis.

“Think of automotive dealers who had certain lots open in some DMAs (designated market areas) and perhaps not in others, or grocery retailers that maybe had kerbside delivery in certain markets but online delivery in others,” Hogue explains.

“The need to have that relevant message can be achieved through things like geographic location, small amounts of data that can allow that personalization to take place.

“The evidence shows that it works. When we look at campaigns that have those kind of KPIs and that relevance built in, oftentimes we’ll see upwards of 40% engagement, whether that’s measured through click-through activity, more time spent, completion, all those different variables.”

You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.

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.

Edison Research’s The Podcast Consumer, the most oft-cited proofpoint, now suggests weekly podcast listening has grown to 17% of Americans aged 12 or over, with a balanced gender split.

More and more publishers are falling over themselves to launch what is seen as booming consumer demand, more advertisers are taking a look and more tech vendors are launching to service all sides.

But podcasts’ historical problem has been its underlying strength – that delivery is typically through RSS feeds, making measurement – and, therefore, advertiser ROI – difficult. Apple went some way to easing that pain last year when it launched an analytics tool – but that still leaves a sizeable chunk of the market unmeasured.

So Nielsen, which has measured media consumption across many channels for years, is taking notice.

“We’re doing a lot of work to extend our measurement to be able to allow for that in the same consistent way that we measure our other types of content,” says Nielsen’s Jessica Hogue in this video interview with Beet.TV.

Nielsen’s Nielsen Audio offering measures how consumers are listening to what it calls “radio”, whether it be via traditional radio stations, streaming or podcast, including “demographic and qualitative profiles of podcast listener”, according to its website. The company is also aiming to measure actual consumption, not just downloads.

But it’s not just about podcasts. Streaming media have come so far in recent years – but one of the new trends is back to downloadable content. Podcasts are typically downloaded to consumers’ devices and Hulu, with which Nielsen announced a measurement partnership, is also now allowing viewers to download shows for offline viewing.

Both of which pose a challenge to measurement that has typically occurred at the time of streaming.

“Certainly, with video, our digital content program, and our content measurement has been able to measure downloadable content,” Hogue adds. “So, it just becomes part and parcel of our measurement program.

“Publishers are looking to find and create these new experiences that are rich, meaningful, immersive.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018.  For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.

They will receive credit for video distributed on Facebook and YouTube within Digital Content Ratings, while Hulu will be providing select media partners with credit for current series content distributed on the platform, Nielsen said in a release.

“What we’re announcing is the ability to credit viewership to content when it’s distributed on Hulu, on Facebook and YouTube back to the media property that originated or created that piece of content,” Jessica Hogue, SVP, Product Leadership at Nielsen says in this interview with Beet.TV. “It demonstrates that we have the flexibility in our framework to be able to adapt our measurement to those new viewing environments.”

Nielsen’s move is in response to “a big theme that we hear from our media clients” regarding the need to provide measurement for distributed platforms, Hogue says.

Nielsen will provide content owners and distributors with the same visibility to data for all distributed video content.

“We do it in a standardized way and it gives our clients confidence that when we add those viewing impressions back into the measurement that they’re getting full coverage,” Hogue adds.

There’s no limitation in terms of the genre or the types of content Nielsen will measure on Facebook, Hulu and YouTube.

“Of course there’s always going to be a demographic skew. We look for all of those elements to be able to give texture to the story in context of where they might have watched that content somewhere else,” Hogue says.

Speaking with Beet.TV, Disney-ABC Television Group’s multiplatform research director Brian West had said the current state of multiplatform measurement was not good enough, and looked like taking a decade to reach completeness.

In this video interview, Nielsen product leadership SVP Jessica Hogue responds.

“It’s absolutely a fair call out,” she says. “There’s continued work to do there, it’s not standardised that everyone is in that measurement framework today. But it’s possible, we have the tools to do it.”

But Hogue says Nielsen has already spent the last few years working hard to give programmers and advertisers what they need.

She counters that Nielsen has expanded its TV measurement to new viewing options, including bundling census-level measurement. And she says Digital Ad Ratings now incorporated views of mobile and over-the-top (OTT) consumption.

“We have built a framework that allows for the flexibility, so we’re going to continue to evolve,” Hogue adds. “There will be new features.”

“Programmers want more. There’s always going to be work to do. It keeps us all employed.”

We interviewed West at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.

Digital Content Ratings is the latest chapter in the group’s Total Audience Measurement roll-out.

Why is Nielsen doing this? Product leadership SVP Jessica Hogue explains: “Marketers don’t want a thousand metrics.

“What we hear from content owners is, they need one number, one way to see that audience. and they need to accumulate it over time. That gives them an opportunity to go back to agency buyers and show them all of that fragmentation in one total portrait.”

Nielsen and comScore are each racing to help advertisers and publishers get their hands around their rapidly growing but splintering audience base, as consumption begins to take place on countless platforms.

Nielsen’s latest offering was built upon its earlier Digital Ad Ratings product, adding in census input and leveraging Nielsen’s panel system to “calibrate” the data.

Hogue continues: “You’ll get one number for the program, regardless of where it was served, how it was consumed.

“Digital Content Ratings gives us a daily measurement across audiences across digital platforms at a level that is granular and give us comparability to traditional television measurement, so that content owners can understand how people are using their content across screens and be able to add that number back across their total numbers.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB MIXX Conference, 2016, presented by The TradeDesk. Please find additional videos from the Conference here.