How the TV industry is preparing for the future of currency—and where it’s not ready yet

Measurement has become a favorite topic of discussion amongst the TV ad industry. But its ability to coalesce around solutions hasn’t been quite as easy. As marketers and networks begin conversations ahead of this year’s upfront selling season, the resounding question has become which currency will be used to strike ad deals following several years of media sellers testing Nielsen rivals. Measurement at this year’s upfront The major media companies, such as Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal, have already announced plans to allow advertisers to strike deals on several currencies during this year’s upfront, including VideoAmp, Comscore and iSpot.tv, in addition to longstander Nielsen. But these plans are not consistent across every seller. “A multi-currency industry scares me a little bit because I don’t know if we’ve done a good job of defining exactly what that means,” said Sam Armando, executive VP, director of national video intelligence at Publicis, during a panel at Paramount’s Measurement Now conference, where leading voices from measurement companies, media agencies and competitive media giants gathered last week. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Armando compared the current currency ecosystem as trying to purchase one’s grocery items with a combination of dollars, pesos and yen despite it all being in one cart, an encapsulation of a recurring sentiment throughout the day. The complicated and patchworked state of measurement has wrapped up buyers and sellers in the minutiae rather than solving fundamentals necessary to start moving money with new measurement alternatives. “We said 18 months ago that this upfront was the upfront where you can transact on more than one currency,” Bharad Ramesh, executive director of research and investment analytics for GroupM, said during a session on measurement transformation. “Where we are today, even across the top five major traditional partners, one alternate currency can’t scale. We don't have it.” But while frustrations resounded about the need to cobble together different metrics and datasets to form a complete view of a campaign’s performance across different platforms and media, the excitement to move from tests to transactions trumped most uncertainties. David Campanelli, executive VP, chief investment officer at Horizon, said last year’s upfront was all talk and, in the end, not enough action. Horizon announced a commitment to use Nielsen alternatives for 15% of its dealmaking last year. “We were rather disappointed that after all the pre-upfront talk last year, when we got to the negotiating table, engagement from networks was very low,” said Campanelli when asked for comment on the commitment. Campanelli declined to specify how much of last year's upfront was transacted on alternative currencies, but added, "We do feel even more momentum this year and are optimistic that a meaningful percentage of our upfront will be on alternative currencies this year.” Overall, this year possesses a renewed momentum with efforts such as OpenAP’s Joint Industry Committee and the slew of certifications from publishers. “The first thing we need to do is have some meaningful volume of guarantees on alternative currency in this upfront,” said Campanelli in a panel. “We have to do it and figure out the problems.” Upfronts future As the debate continues on how the industry juggles multiple currencies, several speakers at Paramount’s event envisioned a near future where measurement is funneled through one source for partners. “In the next five to 10 years, measurement is going to become a platform,” said Kelly Abcarian, executive VP of measurement and impact at NBCU, during the event's keynote. “We’re not going to start talking about, ‘Oh, what currency are you using?’ It’s going to really be a platform that feeds in all of these signals across a lot of different measurement companies that are collecting these signals.” Abcarian displayed a graph, devoid of identifying numbers or names, that showed the disparities between measurement providers compared with NBCU’s in-house data for its streamer Peacock. Aside from showing the company’s own data was substantially higher than the external reports, it also showed as much as a 56% disparity between NBCU’s reach data and that of other measurement providers. Abcarian pointed to similar discrepancies in Amazon’s measurement of “Thursday Night Football” and John Halley, Paramount’s president of advertising, expressed similar results for his company’s content. A major setback, however, lies in funding. Abcarian lamented what she called the “90/10 problem,” in which legacy media companies commit 90% of their research budgets to “crappy counting that’s broken and siloed” and only 10% “to actually prove the impact and the results that matter most.” On the flip side, “the digital guys” are doing the opposite and “taking a lot of credit for the impression serving in the environments that we [TV companies] deliver to consumers on a daily basis,” said Abcarian. LiveRamp managing director Adam Paul said in a later session that the key to Abcarian’s vision of a converged measurement service might be made possible through recent progress in the artificial intelligence space. Paul referenced the decades of TV’s sole reliance on Nielsen that were “hands off for the publishers and the advertisers.” Now that those groups have had to heavily get in the mud on evolving measurement practices, Paul suggested AI and automation software would “get answers easier and faster.” And there's more than just advertising at stake when it comes to getting the best measurement data. “There’s a lot of other stakeholders that any research department at a media company has, like investor relations or press or communications or marketing,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, executive VP and chief research officer at Paramount. Fahey Rush suggested that the likes of VideoAmp, Comscore, Nielsen and iSpot should join forces to share learnings and methodologies, but the idea was quickly joked off (“I love the puppy, rainbow, kitten world, but there’s no competitive advantage in that,” responded Andrea Zapata, executive VP of Ad Sales Research, Measurement and Insights at Warner Bros. Discovery). What is the obsession with content quality? Throughout the event, the specter of competition from the digital-native platforms such as YouTube loomed. One of the latest metrics to be pushed on the TV companies is the Content Quality Index, a measure for the premium quality of content, which was created by NBCU. Abcarian, who of course has championed the metric, argued that the CQI is critical in differentiating the value of an impression, which she said is greater for an NBCU-produced show than a user-generated video on YouTube. But not everyone is on board with that thinking. GroupM’s Ramesh noted that efforts like the CQI were impeding the industry’s ability to efficiently report metrics. “I want all video measured—the consumers are there, the dollars are already there,” said Ramesh. “We sometimes are starting with the first dollar on video on social platforms before they even come onto TV, so this whole thing of premium content and long form content is frustrating.” Media measurement blog Tracking TV, social and digital updates Click here

How the TV industry is preparing for the future of currency—and where it’s not ready yet

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