If the TV of tomorrow really IS the mobile phone, then the Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum (BMCO) reckons that it will need its own unique requirements for audience measurement.
Now we have at least two issues with this statement and the invasion of the BMCO into this arena. The first is that the BMCO has little experience in the world of measuring audiences, but on the other hand it is saying that it invites participation in standards and measurement models from the broadcast mobile industry (no such industry), which may sort out that deficiency. The other weakness is more subtle. We don’t think that the mobile phone WILL become the TV of tomorrow. Let’s explain.
What we are seeing in video viewing is a massive fragmentation, and we are only at the start of the small element of fragmentation which is down to mobile handsets ‘ a few million people in each country perhaps watch streamed video, while far less than that watch broadcast mobile TV right now, with some countries being notable exceptions.
By comparison, watching video over the internet through a browser or browser add on, is now commonplace. Other video fragmentation includes viewing DVDs, Blu-ray players, VoD, DVRs, network DVRs and push VoD, all of which are far more pronounced right now than viewing video on a handset.
In the early days of September, we saw the Council for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) formed in the US by both sides of the TV advertising equation. And it set out to extend audience viewing measurement techniques backed by 14 companies 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, big interested parties from both sides of the equation.
The CIMM will attack the role of the set top in audience reporting, but also try to track the fragmentation of video ‘ the exact same thing that the BMCO says it is working on now.
It is the nature of broadcasting in Europe that each country (or group of countries or each industry) sets itself up as the authority on how the broadcast market dynamics should work, and then proceeds to never listen to anyone else and here we have it again with the BMCO trying to position itself as the lead agency in audience measurement.
We would probably argue the same thing we argued against the CIMM formation ‘ it is not for the market players to create a standard for audience measurement, what instead is needed is a simple interactivity standard which will show advertisers which handsets are reacting to its advertising, from which application. The internet has shown us how to use a return path to measure promotional effectiveness.
Of course it does no harm to count who watches which TV programs, but surely when a return path is provided by cellular this becomes a purely technical problem, and when it is not, there’s nothing new above the Nielsen approach of interviewing people to see what programming they watched.
But our point is more subtle than that. People talk about three screens, but there has never been even two screen assessments. Initially when people saw something which interested, or bemused them, on TV, they just pondered it and perhaps looked it up later, on the internet. With widespread wi-fi in most every home, we have seen the dynamic emerging of viewers looking something up during their viewing. The then take this further, and perhaps look up all the films the actor has been in, or that the director has made. They may look at clips. They may research the period of history the film is set in.
To do this viewers use wi-fi enabled portable devices like PSPs and the DS, as well as phones, like the iPhone and laptops and increasingly netbooks. It is now such a well understood phenomena that you could easily run a TV treasure hunt, where the clues were on the screen and the hunt was over the internet.
But by adding broadcast mobile TV viewing, you are introducing a second or third viewing platform. So while the main TV is perhaps glued to Dad’s football, the son’s handset is on another channel, with the sound channeled through earbuds. At the same time this other process of looking things up continues around two programs now. Add to this making comments on Facebook or another social network and we can see that broadcast mobile TV will not replace TV viewing, but create a complex set of new dynamics ‘ and these include interactions between the media.
So if we set about coming up with a measurement platform for Mobile TV, and we base it on the older idea of letting it show us what video is being viewed, it may miss the most compelling part of the mutual interactions between screens.
Yes, yes, yes we need something NOW to tell us who watch what program on mobile TV, so that SOME advertising is possible and quantifiable. But it would also be nice to know what other applications were run on that device to see if any mutual interaction patterns could emerge.
It sounds complicated (and it is a bit) but surely having adverts which are similar (but subtly different) which run at the same time on another screen will result in far higher engagement. The son getting an advert for perhaps the same product, but an ad subtly geared to him at the same time as Dad watches another advert geared to his age group, for instance.
What all prior approaches to mobile TV advertising have suggested is that there is the potential to dip into addressable advertising and coming up with a summary of demographic data coupled with understanding what content is being watched or where you are physically located. The mobile device is the first which might address all of these at once. The cellphone owner demographic is well known by the operator, location services are available, and there only needs to be a piece of software on the client which views the video or channel selection process or which dynamically samples the content intelligently, to achieve them all.
And yet virtually no mobile broadcasting system exists for audience measurement nor for addressable advertising. The difficultly is that first off, except in Japan and Korea, there is nowhere near enough penetration in broadcast mobile TV yet to make audience measurement worthwhile or even necessary.
Secondly, it is only once we have 1 or 2 million regular viewers and we talk to them, that we are going to have any real understanding of their behavior while viewing broadcast mobile TV. We especially don’t know if there is going to be any premium value from advertising agencies placed on addressable advertising, although everyone understands the theory, there is little to no practice. And what practice there is, is about Content Addressability ‘ putting different advertising up based on what you are watching, not based on who you are, and that is quite simply not enough to change the fundamental value of advertising as full addressable advertising might.
Thirdly in Europe, where the BMCO originates and where most of its members are, there is a continuing prevalent belief that viewers will pay for mobile TV, even though all the evidence around the world suggests that if you go down the pay TV route for mobile TV, you end up with a handful of customers and a service that is non-viable, at least for advertising.
We should launch broadcast services in Europe and they should be free, then wait two years while numbers build up, then look at mobile broadcast advertising and its hurdles and THEN design methods of reporting anything which will increase advertising values for that platform. It would be sad to implement an audience measurement scheme that cost a lot of money, only to find that broadcasters sent the same advertising to handsets as they did to homes and valued it in the same way, ignoring every element of our measurement system except who was watching what.
What the BMCO says it is after is audience measurement and aggregation of usage data across all forms of audio-visual content consumption. And to this end it ran a workshop discussing the different expectations, objectives and approaches of the various market players which concluded that ‘there is still much work to be done in bridging the gap between audience measurement in the broadcast world and usage monitoring of the mobile operators’ and highlights the lack of commercial relationships, issues of measurement neutrality, and the reliability of data and ensuring consumers’ privacy as the key issues, which let’s face it, is another way of saying, we’re not sure who makes money out of this, we’re not sure who is to be trusted with the measurement process, and we’re not yet sure how to ensure that the data is not falsified in any way or tracked back to customers. In other words we are at ground zero in mobile audience measurement.