With 78% of its viewing happening on living room television sets, Hulu has a big stake in solutions like comScore\u2019s soon-to-launch Campaign Ratings tool for measuring de-duplicated, cross-platform audiences. \u201cI would say that there has been a lot of progress\u201d in cross-screen measurement, says Hulu\u2019s Julie DeTraglia. \u201cI will give the industry all of the credit because it isn\u2019t easy.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the Wall Street Journal reports<\/a>, comScore launched Xmedia a few years ago to measure and de-duplicate viewers across screens, but that product didn\u2019t specify how many people saw the actual ads. Campaign Ratings will launch in beta this September, with support from nearly all media companies and existing customers, including ABC, CBS, Fox, Viacom, Hulu and others.<\/p>\n In this interview with Beet.TV, DeTraglia recalls a time when TV viewing consisted of just one screen \u201cand there was a system that worked\u201d for measuring audiences. \u201cAnd then everything fragmented very, very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n While companies were figuring out how to quantify audiences on desktop computers and then mobile devices, \u201cWhat happened in between there was that living room connected devices really leapfrogged, at least in terms of television content and other video as well, as being a first choice for watching digitally,\u201d explains DeTraglia, who is VP and Head of Research.<\/p>\n As has been the case with linear TV, connected-TV viewing is a shared experience, which has measurement drawbacks.<\/p>\n \u201cNone of the data that had existed or the measurement that had existed took that into account. So we were never really able to get a very accurate understanding of the reach of Hulu.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus the company has worked with various companies, including comScore and Nielsen.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have this benefit of having first party subscriber level data that we can leverage in a variety of ways, and one of them is working with these third-party companies to use it as a baseline for measuring audience,\u201d DeTraglia says.<\/p>\n Hulu has worked with Nielsen on DAR side for OTT and with comScore on its vCE<\/a> offering.<\/p>\n To achieve accurate, consistent cross-screen measurement requires \u201cfull industry participation, and some are more interested in doing that than others,\u201d she says. “It just takes a very long time. It\u2019s not an easy thing to implement or execute. We believe it\u2019s important to live in a third-party verified world and we know that it\u2019s important to our advertisers.\u201d<\/p>\n