Every now and then the television industry tries to reinvent the way in which it is measured. This usually involves attacking Nielsen for both the wrong and the right reasons, and is mostly motivated out of the desire to get advertisers to spend more money. Increasingly the aim is to get them to spend the same amount as last year, rather than more, because more is no longer a viable target.
Of course these efforts are fundamentally flawed, in that what they end up achieving, if anything, is some improved way of measuring the fact that their market, as it is, is failing. The only way ahead for the TV industry is to change what it does, and find some way to embrace the internet, not look for more information on how they already do business. And to be fair, slowly the leaders of the US broadcasting industry are becoming aware of that, but still they cannot stop tampering with the measurement process.
So in the early days of September, the Council for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) was formed by the great and the good on both sides of the TV advertising equation, those who broadcast and those who buy ads. This perhaps signalled the last Hurrah for the US media companies, who have benefited in the past from Nielsen’s intervention as the grand Poobah of media effectiveness.
Our own simplistic view of the dynamics involved, is that Nielsen sits between the spenders on advertising and the recipients of advertising revenues. It has to please both sides and that’s tough. First off it has to convince people that it is being accurate when it says channel X is being viewed by Y number of people, for Z hours a month. At the same time it has to prove that it listens to both sides. It’s position has to be ‘We understand your point about TVs being left on for days without being watched, so we’ve invented this new way of measuring viewing figures,’ or ‘We know that a certain number of people fast forward through your adverts, so we’ve done experiments in trying to measure the brand effect of this.’
There are no room for two versions of the truth in this world, because that will sow the seeds of mistrust and doubt in an industry largely based on trust and a feel good factor, rather than measurable results. It is either a world where Nielsen is right, or it is a world where somebody else is right.
For the past five years Nielsen has been between a rock and a hard place, primarily because it is speaking to a dying market. Many times we have accused it of being on the side of broadcast continuing as a viable media, but to be fair, it has explored, as much as anyone, out of pure self preservation, lots of new technical routes to achieve what it does already.
And yet it is this area, new technical services, which is the entire rationale for the new operation, with 14 companies making up the initial membership including AT&T, CBS, Discovery, GroupM, Interpublic Group’s Mediabrands, NBC Universal, News Corporation, Omnicom Media Group, P&G, Starcom MediaVest, Time Warner, Unilever, Viacom and Disney ‘ as we said, big interested parties from both sides of the equation.
This is a cross between major advertisers like Proctor and Gamble and some major agencies, and major broadcasters.
What the CIMM says will happen is that it will set up trials to measure two key things, how a set top can reliably report back to a central system the programming which people have watched, and how the fragmentation of video viewing can be tracked. This latter issue is caused largely by a drift from viewing in-home broadcasts to viewing out of home TV, internet video, often copied from broadcast TV, and the viewing of TV and video on portable devices. The CIMM is calling this second piece cross-platform measurement.
What it has dreamed up is very similar to another dream we all witnessed in enterprise software in the 1990s in CRM systems. The hope then was that every time a human touched an enterprise, be it a phone call, clicking on an advert on the internet, or ordering a test of a product, it all came to rest inside his or her CRM records. It was referred to as a 360 degree view of the prospect.
What the CIMM wants is a 360 degree view of the viewer, and a record of all of his or her touchpoints to a piece of content. Not only is this largely impossible, and doomed to fail in the same way that the CRM dream failed, but even if someone managed it, the moment it was complete and agreed upon, it would be out of date. Another video fragmentation would come along, say for instance watching video over the mobile internet, and it would have to be somehow incorporated into the new measurement model.
Another thing that gets in the way is that often the works are pirated or contained in VoD services where the content is not surrounded by its original advertising, for instance on Hulu or YouTube. You can’t have a system that measures a person’s engagement with content and insists that the advertiser pays for all those engagements, if their advertising is not present in all of them.
Sure you can sort out a standard for set top reporting, where cable, IPTV and even connected terrestrial set tops and connected satellite set tops, all report what channel the TV was tuned to and for how long. We’re not sure that’s very much use. If there are four TVs turned on, on average in most US homes, and the average occupants are 2.4 people (US census data), then when those TVs are all on, they cannot all have one person viewing them. All that shows is that dumb recording of physical key presses are no good on their own, (although TV sets which switch themselves off when non-one is watching them, will help slowly with this).
Which is why companies like Nielsen (in fact it has to BE Nielsen) will HAVE to be part and parcel of the calibration process to work out what such physical data means. That means that data from interview and People Meters (where people voluntarily record when they enter or leave a room with a TV in and begin to watch) need to show the SAME results in the same households as physical viewing data, or there will be two versions of the truth, and then both sides will be unhappy.
Advertisers will want to use the lowest number of the two, while broadcasters will want the higher.
So in effect this is a talking shop to create a version of the truth that they are all happy with, effectively the same function that Nielsen has always had.
There are some whacky systems that Nielsen and others have posited to improve this, such as software in a mobile phone which records and identifies music and then matches it to a database of what programming had that music licensed to it in the broadcast area of the base station, but each of them have holes in except one ‘ interactivity, and that brings us back to the internet.
When customers engage directly with an advertiser through a return path in a network, they demonstrate to him not only that they are there, viewing his material, but they also have a level of interest in the products being advertised. The advertiser can’t perhaps measure brand awareness changes in this way, but can measure direct sales and anyway, interactive engagement, even without a sale, means improved brand awareness. It is this simple fact that has driven internet advertising over the years to where it is today.
Take that internet interactivity model, drop it, through the use of widgets, onto ALL TV sets ‘ including digital terrestrial set tops which will increasingly be internet connected hybrids, and we are measuring real engagement, not only with the programming, but with the advertised product.
There is no point trying to holistically measures all touchpoints across media. It is better to measure interactive responses across all media.
That way if an engagement began after viewing your adverts 5 times, and was finally acted upon when someone made an online order through Amazon while watching TV, you can at least accurately measure the last step in the chain, and offline brand studies will give you clues as to how the buyer reached that point ‘ though not hard data.
In the end CIMM thinks it is expert, when it is not. It is a group of companies either side of Nielsen, which is the true expert, pulling it in two directions, and once again Nielsen is trying to ensure that both sides are satisfied.
Nielsen of course will be part of the solution the CIMM decides upon, and any measurement system that comes out of this, we predict, will have to accommodate and not embarrass the existing systems which are in place. The status quo will be continued and very little will change and the resentment that this group has for the $1 billion bill that Nielsen extracts out of this community, in order police advertising value, will continue.
At least it will continue until interactivity makes up a broader part of the advertising world, and then viewer measurement can give way to effectiveness.