Consumers today are screen-agnostic, and watch content from anywhere. Yet with these evolved consumption habits, most companies are still relying on legacy behaviors for measurement.

“We wanted to leverage measurement, attribution, new data capabilities and tools as important change agents to affect the new way of thinking and new way of doing.” Zhang says.

One part of Dentsu’s new initiative is to educate their own teams and clients about what new data sets are available. According to Zhang, the company is thinking beyond age and gender in terms of audience, and looking at measurement and attribution available across platforms in order to more accurately prove performance.

“Our philosophy is that measurement as a whole is not just the output at the end,” Zhang says. “We want to leverage measurement and attribution studies as input to inform overall planning, to inform cross-platform activation, and allocation.”

Only when they have tangible, quantifiable results through measurement and attribution studies will clients change their behavior and embrace more innovative practices.

One of these more forward-thinking practices is the use of “attention” as measurement. Attention economy is one of Dentsu’s major studies at the moment. Their goal is to create a value system based off of a user’s attention. With consumers being flooded with media messages, they’re looking further into what differentiates exposure from actual attention to a piece of media.

“We have conducted multi-country, multi-phased research since 2018,” Zhang says. “One is to better understand: what is attention? If we want to operationalize attention as a metric, what goes into that? What are the components? What are the factors we need to account for?”

They have completed phase one research on this topic, and shared results around the predictors and drivers of attention across platforms. Now in phase two, they’re collecting data in a large sample size across platforms and channels so that they can standardize these attention metrics from various sources. Eventually, they will create a proprietary attention metric that applies across platforms.

According to Zhang, Dentsu has conducted a comprehensive audit of ACR data, and from this, has learned more of the opportunity that these figures present. She sees particular potential for the granularity, real-time nature, and linear transferability of the data, but recognizes that it works best when paired with other numbers.

“ACR data alone is not the only source,” says Zhang. “We’re looking into the possibility of co-mingling or connecting ACR data with traditional panel data as well.”

Zhang adds that they’re currently looking into cross-platform measurement capabilities based on ACR, too. She’s excited about all of the great OTT services currently available and the content that goes with them. She believes that there’s opportunity for brands to connect more effectively on ad-supported networks as well as an ability to create a more individualized connection.

As far as addressability, Zhang has already identified national linear addressability as a trend in 2020, which will allow for a more customized experience for the consumer.

“Now with the new possibility of unlocking more national linear addressable impressions, we definitely see great opportunity for more personalized [content] in creative to create a more relevant experience for our viewers,” says Zhang.

This should also help to better manage frequency, which has been an issue, especially for heavy linear viewers.

In 2020, Zhang hopes to collaborate to better unite the different moving parts of the television and digital marketplace.

“I’d love to talk more about standardization,” says Zhang. “Our marketplace has been very fragmented. There’s a challenge in the OTT measurement space, and how can marketers understand holistically across all of the tactics—addressable is one, CTT and OTT are another one, and there are so many more.”

Maggie Zhang will be speaking at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 5 to 7, 2020.

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

The SVP of Video Research & Insights for Dentsu Aegis Network is seeing an “explosive growth of attribution vendors,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

Such providers have traditionally been digital oriented, measuring multi-touch attribution across all digital touchpoints. “But now, especially this year, there’s been a growing school of TV specialists,” Zhang says.

“They are able to attribute the impact of big-screen, top-funnel impact of TV advertising to the actual business outcome in terms of any type of conversion metric, be it foot traffic or online purchase, offline purchase.”

Dentsu Aegis has been doing “a very thorough audit across the entire spectrum of TV/cross platform video attribution vetting. It’s still going and we’ve learned a lot just to understand their modeling approach, their TV/video data sources, their conversion metric sources and how they can match together and modeling and analyze and predict the outcome.”

In an age sensitive to consumer privacy and increasing data regulations, the media agency is looking into “pixel-less methodology” to measure both conversion and viewership data.

“So ACR data is one good example and there are also a lot of other tech platforms that are able to provide data, especially on the back end without pixels. So we’re able to measure in terms of the audience in a one-to-one, deterministic fashion.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.

Analysis from nScreenMedia suggests U.S. Netflix viewers, by substituting free viewing for subscription video-on-demand, are missing 2 billion ad views every day, totaling missing ad sales estimated at between $3 billion and $6 billion annually.

So what’s an ad buyer to do? The woman in charge of helping one major ad agency plan the future destination for billions of dollars says the industry wants to get better understanding.

Maggie Zhang, SVP on-linear video research and insights at Amplifi, the media investment arm of Dentsu Aegis Network, had this video interview with Beet.TV

In it, Zhang says: “In order to understand the audience shift from linear platforms to OTT-connected TV platforms, we need to drive further understanding of the audiences that are viewing ad-supported content on OTT platforms as well as the impact of SVOD, which is ad-free subscription-based OTT services, and the subscribers and also understand the impact of linear TV ratings as a result of the increasing amount of SVOD subscription.

“We have done a lot of analysis and internal research on these audiences and the impact on linear ratings. We are having more in-depth analysis of OTT ad-supported viewers as well as SVOD viewers on the OTT platforms. And potentially, the insight will be able to drive and inform at lot of our cross-platform video investment decisions.”

Earlier, eMarketer had forecast US TV ad spending would this year dip below the $70bn mark as audience viewing behavior shifts more and more toward OTT options, with the number of OTT viewers growing 2.7% to reach 198.6 million.

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.