That precipitated a range of initiatives, collaborations and consortia aimed at making things simpler, achieving scale and reducing the number of players buyers need to work with.

But, outside of the US, things are already neatly packaged in this way.

That is according to Matt O’Grady, chief commercial officer of Nielsen Global Media, the media measurement house.

Matt O’Grady relocated to London earlier this year, after a decade with the company in New York.

In this video interview with Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz for Beet.TV, he says: “The nice about all of the international markets outside of the US is that they usually either have a committee – a joint industry committee, or an informal committee – that decides on one particular measurement company to come in and be the measurement provider for TAM or for digital or for advertising intelligence. And I think that model works quite well.”

In 2012, UKOM (the UK Online Measurement Company), which uses both a panel and a tag-based census network to measure online audiences, picked comScore to replace Nielsen as its provider.

Earlier this year, BARB (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) selected Kantar Media to provide in-home broadband “router meters”, allowing BARB to distinguish between broadcaster-VOD service viewing and PVR viewing, and to better measure smartphone viewing.

Nielsen’s Television Audience Measurement (TAM) is deployed in 12 other European countries.

“What people really need to measure is the streaming content on any device in or out of the home, they need to measure both the content and the ad,” O’Grady adds.

“Measuring streaming ads for connected or over-the-top or IP is more difficult. But Nielsen does have an international solution that allows us to measure both in-home viewing, any streaming in or out of the home, and requires the broadcaster or the distributor to cooperate with us to ensure that we collect all of that viewing.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

A consensus also emerged during the session that ultimately, one or more companies will figure out how to compensate consumers for their data beyond simply dispensing coupons and swag, perhaps one of the major credit card providers.

The panel was moderated by consultant Howard Shimmel, most recently of Turner Broadcasting, who at the outset mentioned the Starwood data breach because it was in the headlines that very morning. He asked whether despite the availability of great content and technology, “immense demand and an appetite to scale,” there will be enough data available given new legislation like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California.

Jodie McAfee of Inscape, a subsidiary of smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO, related the “classic case of no good deed goes unpunished” that occurred in 2015. VIZIO had just pushed to TV owners notification of how it collects household viewing data and where the data ends up. One of those owners was a reporter for Pro Publica who wrote a mostly “inaccurate” story about how TV’s can spy on them, according to McAfee.

“Two class action lawyers saw the article, found two plaintiffs and sued us and the rest was a complete mess,” said McAfee.

Among the more interesting learnings from the whole episode, the Federal Trade Commission thought that the language explaining what VIZIO does with owners’ viewing data was too buried. It should be “separate and prominent” from the TV setup process, which is what VIZIO ended up doing.

“Unless and until the consumer clicks ‘I accept,’ data collection is default off on our TV’s, so it is a full, true opt-in regime,” said McAfee.

Another relevant learning was the FTC’s view of the so-called value exchange that most advertising and media companies believe underpins the collection of consumer data. The government said “everybody needs to stop promising this idea that when the consumer opts in they’re going to get these bells and whistles around greater search and recommendation or whatever. Just knock it off. That’s not necessary and it’s kind of bullshit. Just tell them what you’re doing,” McAfee said.

The architects of GDPR hold the same view, according to McAfee. “It’s in GDPR. Don’t promise anything special. Just be clear about what you’re doing. That’s all anybody cares about.”

With an opt-in rate of 90% in the United States, “What we’ve learned is if you’re front and center with it and you are completely transparent about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, pretty much everybody, at least in the United States, they’ll opt in and they’re fine with it,” McAfee added.

Robert Bareuther of analytics and measurement firm iSpot.tv said the company gets “a tremendous amount of raw data from our valued partner VIZIO and we take that raw data and we decipher it into how households view content” and then measure business outcomes for advertisers. “We never see any private data, but it’s very important to us that rules are followed and you don’t breach anything. I think VIZIO’s done a spectacular job of making sure that everything’s on the up and up,” said Bareuther.

Nielsen Catalina’s Matt O’Grady said his company doesn’t touch any personally identifiable information about consumers, “but our applications for measurement and targeting are highly dependent upon PII. I’m dependent upon everybody in the ecosystem not violation or for lack of a better expression not screwing up.”

As for the impact of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica misadventure, “that made our liability statements and our onboarding much more difficult than it had ever been before,” said O’Grady.

Asked by Shimmel whether CPPA in California will end up looking like GDPR, O’Grady said the initiative is “a very healthy democracy in the sense that the pendulum can swing and people can really get a chance to voice their concerns. But I think a good substantial part of that opt-in is going to be re-written” before the law takes effect in January of 2020.

So will marketers ever end up having to actually pay consumers directly for their data, along with letting them control their data? “If I was involved in that, I don’t want a coupon,” said O’Grady. “I want true compensation for that. Somebody’s going to come along and figure out how to crack this nut. I don’t know if it’s going to be five years or twenty years from now, but I really do believe that we’re heading in that direction and there’s an enormous opportunity for somebody to come up with the vault concept.”

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.

In fact, it’s “nirvana in a sense,” O’Grady adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018. He was interviewed by TV research veteran Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV

“It’s where all marketers are heading. They want to know for every dollar they spent what’s the return on the investment.”

Not that it’s quick or easy, like perusing overnight television ratings. “So we’re lucky to be in that business, we’re lucky to have all these assets, but a lot of it is still manual. A lot of it is putting the pieces and parts together.”

Things are headed beyond just activation targeting and measurement. “It always has to start with planning. So we call that purchase-driven planning,” O’Grady adds.

Asked for his view of consumer data mishaps in general and the recent Marriott breach of its Starwood guest reservation database, which exposed the personal information of up to 500 million people, he points to Catalina’s “flawless track record” on the use and protection of such data.

“Data protection was always on our mind before privacy was branded on our forehead,” he says. “It’s actually the retailers that have the permission base to use the loyalty card data with the actual shopper. That is extended to Catalina.”

He doesn’t think the trend is toward an opt-in model, “but opt out is definitely an opportunity at all those retailers and so we’re going to have to watch that very closely.”

Because consumers really don’t fully understand how their loyalty data are being used, O’Grady believes it’s incumbent on the industry to educate them. The first step is making things clear. “They’re probably not going to resent it. They resent probably surprises.”

Step No. 2 is give people a chance to opt out of data-sharing, followed by making sure “your partners are being really, really clear and disciplined about how they protect the data. Because any of those three things could derail you very quickly.”

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.

“Transparency is unquestionably the table stakes at this point,” O’Grady says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“It’s a lot more than viewability, it’s a lot more than preventing fraud. Everybody along the supply chain is responsible for transparency. I really think we’ve hit a tipping point where everybody is acknowledging that we’re all collectively responsible.”

He feels that Nielsen is in a unique position because its data offerings combine television ratings, digital ad ratings and purchase insights from consumer shopping panels. For marketers, everything should add up to top quality in both data and match rates.

“If it isn’t, you just have to acknowledge and be transparent with what can work and what does work. The responsibility is across the whole supply chain,” O’Grady says.

Cross-screen measurement and cross-screen access to advertisers has changed dramatically, he adds.

“I really think we’re at an inflection point for TV or TV content, premium video content, we can measure it. We have a holistic means to measure the impact across all these different channels and then add it up.”

O’Grady considers blockchain technology for advertising and media to “potentially be a very valuable tool” whose true utility remains to be proven. “It’s just not known yet.”

One key promise of blockchain is the security of data that blockchain participants agree to share. “I think there’s great promise there. But it’s very early stages.”

O’Grady likens the industry’s interest in blockchain to artificial intelligence and virtual reality “and I’ve yet to see an application for the advertising ecosystem that’s truly made an impact. Maybe on the creative side it has.

“But if blockchain’s really going to manage or improve that work stream, particularly in the programmatic space, there’s great need for improvement.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

So it was at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 when representatives of Tru Optik, Inscape, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Team Arrow Partners gathered on stage with moderator Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. While there was overall cordiality, there was no mincing of words when discussing the business and technical challenges of audience measurement.

They ranged from agency compensation that accentuates cheap CPM’s over business outcomes to the speed with which campaigns can be analyzed for return on investment. After summarizing the four core ways to measure TV—panel, set-top box data, automatic content recognition (ACR) data and in-app—Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston offered these observations on device validation and audience de-duplification:

“If I spent a million dollars with Hulu and a million dollars with NBC and a million dollars with Fox and a million dollars with Crackle, that’s great that I had 100 million impressions. How many households did I reach?” De-duplicating across multiple publishers and platforms is “not anything super sexy or exciting, but it’s some of the basic things that people come to expect across linear and digital.”

Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, cited speed to market as a big challenge. “Campaigns are running longer and longer, or somebody is always on in the marketplace, so our traditional methodology of test and control is just too slow quite honestly. So we’re investing very heavily in new models that are based upon artificial intelligence and multiple models running simultaneously so that we can get faster results and so that we can get true in-flight reads that somewhat mimic what the end result is.”

Then there’s the issue of whose data are deemed to be the most useful, according to Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Inscape. “What we hear a lot of is ‘we think that the legacy data sets and specifically Nielsen data is flawed.’ And then people will look at our data and they’ll go ‘well this doesn’t match up with Nielsen data.’ The same people that believe that those legacy data sets are flawed have business systems and operations historically built around those datasets that you literally would have to practically blow up the entire market just to get everybody to change.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, GroupM’s dedicated agency for retailer Target, addressed one of many elephants in the room: how some agencies are compensated. “The idea that you want to target tightly to reach an audience to drive a response but you’re being held accountable to declining CPM’s is wrong, obviously. It’s misaligned. It sets up the wrong incentives.”

More than one panelist took issue with the preponderance of companies that claim to be able to do various things—leading to people at other companies burning time just trying to find the truth.

Said Swanston, whose background is in finance (J.P. Morgan), to much laughter: “I’ve never kind of experienced an industry where there’s so much smoke blown. The advertising and tech. A lot of people are full of it in this industry. And I say that in a nice way.”

Added McAfee: “There are an absolute crap-load of companies that are way out over their skies and we think it does a disservice to the market. We spend entirely too many cycles trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. As opposed to just doing our day jobs.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Take low-penetration brands. Advanced targeting is challenging “because you may not find the reach that you want, but you can certainly find the audience,” says Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions. “We can deliver the audience and if you’re using real data, which we are, we can ensure that these are actual buyers and not bots because buyers go shopping, bots don’t.”

As O’Grady goes on to explain in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, a high-quality buy sometimes means less reach. “Advertisers are used to certain CPM’s and certain reaches, so it’s different. Everyone’s got to be willing to put up with the disruption that goes along with that change.”

Categories like food and beverages, which traditionally spend large amounts on TV, have already taken the plunge with advanced targeting. But brands that probably need it the most—low-penetration, niche players—typically don’t have the resources.

“But the bigger brands, particularly in the salty snacks and beverage categories, which are highly competitive, for any percent or micro percent of a share, they’re using it quite actively,” O’Grady says.

While most agencies “listen intently” to a discourse on advanced targeting, many “are really tightly strapped, but the creative ones are looking for ways to buy those audiences.”

One of the biggest unspoken challenges: the size of the buy and its cost per thousand impressions, given that many marketers are used to paying what they have in the past.

“You might have a far greater sales lift, but they may not want to put up with the tradeoff of lower reach,” says O’Grady.

While Nielsen Catalina is knee-deep in consumer segmentation data, it’s not about simply selling segments. “They’re just not buying a heavy Tide buyer. You also will understand the reach and frequency,” says O’Grady. “That’s nirvana I believe for the advertiser because that will bring the accountability and disciplines that a lot of the CMO’s in the CPG space have been very vocal about.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Nielsen Catalina Solutions already helps advertisers target ads using so-called “buyergraphic” data, using its database of purchase history from 90mn households.

Now the practice is coming to over-the-top internet TV ads, through a partnership between Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) and video ad-tech firm Innovid.

The pair announced that Innovid would help TV ad buyers use consumer purchase history data to target ads in apps served across 25 different connected TV devices, including OTT-enabled boxes, smart TVs, gaming consoles, and Blu-ray streaming players and over 1,000 different TV and video apps.

GroupM’s Modi Media is amongst the first to help advertisers use the system, with Nestle Purina PetCare amongst its first clients to jump in.

“They can allow an advertiser to dynamically insert or target an audience based on NCS,” said Nielsen Catalina Solutions Matt O’Grady, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “This is just one example of how you can use purchase-based segments, which has traditionally been used most effectively in a digital arena, for digital TV, as well as for linear TV.”