FTVA Global: can the UK catch up with US measurement?

Even though the UK has BARB measurement data and Cflight and Project Origin in the pipeline, we are still behind the US in their campaign measuring abilities, the Future of TV Advertising Global heard this week.

Kristin Dolan, founder and CEO of measurement and attribution company 605, added her perspective on US TV advertising in The Big Debate: Next steps in the Great TV Measurement Transformation.

She described to delegates 605’s second-by-second measurement of 22 million households watching 1.3 million tuning events every night, compared to BARB’s panel of 5000 households which is slated to increase to 7000 soon.

One example she gave was how 605 could look at how long a product placement, like an item on the desk of The Late Show, has been on screen, and then look at how many people were exposed and not exposed to it – taking into account first-party data to see if sales, brand awareness or website visits went up.

Dolan added that they use this dataset for “the whole lifecycle”, planning, optimization, measurement, attribution, and then predictions and this measurement goes across linear, addressable, AVOD, SVOD and has the potential for digital viewing.

While she acknowledged measurement is not perfect as automatic content recognition (ACR) could not always distinguish what platform certain shows were being viewed on, she said larger datasets with “truly comparable” exposed and non-exposed groups across viewing platforms helped build a detailed picture for advertisers and agencies of what is working and what is not working.

Dolan formed part of a panel of industry experts tackling “the hottest topic in media at the moment” – the reality of what cross-media deduplicated measurement could look like in the UK.

As Matt Hill, research and planning director at Thinkbox pointed out, the three UK measurement solutions seem to have “come along at once”, namely BARB’s “once-in-a-generation” BVOD and SVOD integration, Sky, ITV and Channel 4 collaborating on Cflight and the controversial Project Origin.

Rhian Feather, head of media planning at OMD, pointed out that these initiatives had not come about overnight and mentioned that the industry was yet to see “an output” from Project Origin yet.

However, she did acknowledge the different measurement systems would be serving “different purposes” for media buyers and one difficulty would be using them to differentiate between individual and household viewing.

Feather specifically welcomed BARB’s new measuring capabilities of SVOD (and video-sharing) platforms as advertisers, agencies and broadcasters had previously been “blind” to one in five viewers who mostly watched content on ad-free SVOD platforms.

The updates from BARB will start to answer the questions from advertisers about where these missing 20% of viewers are and what they are talking about which can help with cross-media planning, she added.

Feather disagreed with YouTube’s product lead, Tom Sherwood, when he said we should take the lead from what advertisers want from measurement, as she maintained it should be agencies as they have more expertise.

When asked how he felt about BARB now measuring YouTube as a video-sharing platform, Sherwood acknowledged it was “complicated” as he does not yet have full access to the data but that Justin Sampson, BARB CEO, had been “really transparent” about the “gaps”.

Sherwood did go on to call for industry-wide collaboration on measurement saying: “Encouragingly I do think we share a common goal, which is to make a really complex space a little easier for advertisers and agencies.”

He explained that YouTube has some “core principles” for measurement of its global activities: “First off, we really need a solution that adheres to industry decided upon standards that are essentially universally agreed. And then we think it should really be governed by completely neutral parties. It needs to protect user privacy above all else, but I think most importantly, it needs to be developed in partnership or led by the advertising agency community. I think ultimately, it’s about finding a vehicle for consensus across all the parties, and I feel like we are on the precipice of an opportunity for another once-in-a-generational change.”

Martin Greenbank, head of advertising research and development at Channel 4, said: “TV, film, cinema and digital are all coming into one place.”

He commented that above all, measurement should be centred on people as “following viewer behaviour is the most important thing to crack”.

On the topic of Cflight progress, which he and Matt Hill both work on, he revealed it was in test stages with live data in the system.