This efforts are manifest at Criteo, and with the work it’s doing notably with The Trade Desk and Google, explains Megan Clarken, CEO in this interview with Matt Prohaska for Beet.TV

She explains the importance of the alliance with The Trade Desk and Unified ID 2.0. She declares the partnership with The Trade Desk comprises reach of the world’s largest group of brands and media owners.

The former senior Nielsen executive adds that while the identity graph is powered by the shopper data, it is contextualized to create audience segments.

For more of the conversation between Clarken and Prohaska, listen to them on this episode of the Beet.TV podcast.

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OpenSlate provides data about the content, subject matter and suitability of more than 600 million YouTube and Facebook videos for advertisers to determine whether the inventory is a good fit for their brand.

It is one of a growing plethora of “brand safety” tools aiming to give ad buyers more control.

“What Open Slate does is it uses machine learning to work out what a brand-safe environment looks like for a particular brand, and it’s able to score back to the advertiser whether or not their advertising got into the right content,” says Nielsen Global Media’s chief commercial officer Megan Clarken in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We think that that is imperative to a hygiene metric, a true reach metric, and it’s an important output for the advertiser to know that they got what they paid for.”

Meanwhile, Clarken says, whilst cross-screen measurement of TV shows with linear ad shows is rolled out, comparing apples to apples when different TV environments include different ad sizes and ad loads remains a complex challenge.

“Being able to credit based on something like, ‘was somebody watching a TV programme, but at the same time on their iPad and on their phone looking at content at the same time?’ – how do you credit that to the minute? It’s really tricky,” she says.

“The devil’s in the details somewhat. It’s very tricky to put the rules around that and make sure that you ground yourself on a standard which is a common standard that the industry agrees to so that you can implement.”

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

Many ad buyers, of course, want specific metrics to indicate real viewership and attribution of consequential purchase actions.

But many brands, even digital ones, are now getting frustrated by the fragmenting array of measurement opportunities – and are turning back to align their video efforts more closely with traditional TV campaigns.

That is according to an executive from media measurement house Nielsen.

“What we actually see now happening, is that the digital first players and the digital platforms, for premium video, have decided that all of the data that they have is just confusing the advertiser,” says Megan Clarken, Nielsen chief commercial officer, Nielsen Global Media, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“So they want to compete against TV, and so they’re moving across to be able to compare to TV. Things are coming back to the more simple.

“If you look at the digital players, they want to compete, video is video. So we don’t think about linear TV or digital video. We see video, as video. And premium video, as video. What we know is that the TV landscape, the traditional TV landscape has always based their buying and selling or the way in which they talk about their audiences, in the same common currency.”

Such a trend, if it is happening, would be big news for a media landscape that offers so much opportunity for precision measurement.

But it could also be a warning sign for that same industry – rationalize your confusing array of measurements now, or risk TV continuing to call the shots.

Clarken acknowledges that the “journey” of the evolution of media measurement “never finishes”.

And her Nielsen itself continues to go through its own redefinition – adding digital measurements to its classical panel systems, and restructuring itself.

“We’ve had a new CEO come in, at the end of last year,” Clarken says. “He went through some organizational change in the beginning of the year and like anything internally, it takes a long time to do.

“Our company is going through a strategic review, and like anything, it’s a lot of work.”

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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.