NBCUniversal has become the latest media owner to launch its own effort to quantify impact for advertisers.
It’s called Total Investment Impact, an attempt to measure the effectiveness of advertising across campaigns, screens and platforms, focused not on simple impressions but on business results.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kavita Vazirani, EVP, Insights & Measurement and NBCUniversal, explains the idea.
Introducing Total Investment Impact, our industry-first measurement capability demonstrating the power of an advertiser's NBCU cross-platform investment.
Read more from @kavitav, EVP, Insights & Measurement, and Pankaj Kumar, SVP, Advertising Impact, on scaling impact with NBCU.
— NBCU Together (@NBCUTogether) September 17, 2020
“Advertising isn’t just about buying and selling spots,” Vazirani says.
“We really want to shift the dialogue from impressions and exposures to measurable impact. How are we driving sales for our advertisers? How are we moving cars off of lots?
“So we have invested significant amount in our data and modelling capabilities to build a model that’s going to allow us to look at performance on an ongoing basis.
“We’re able to make recommendations on what is the best plan for you, for a marketer, to activate on, that is going to drive sales? And all of those results get fed back into our model to have this ongoing optimization on a metric that is more important to the marketer, which is sales, than just impressions.”
The launch comes as NBCUniversal also launches an insight report into how audience behavior is changing.
Its One Audience Trends report used proprietary data from across NBCUniversal services.
NBCUniversal’s brand new “One Audience Trends” report provides marketers with informative and actionable insight into consumption trends and how these shifts can have a transformative impact on ad buying and planning.
Download the full report below.
— NBCU Together (@NBCUTogether) September 24, 2020
Interesting results are:
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.
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