That great US entertainment paper Variety claims to have a major scoop on an advertising deal that might give sleepless nights to Nielsen, and open the door to far tighter integration between US TV channels and advertisers.
And at the heart of the issue is how to value a multiscreen viewing compared to a TV version of the same program.
The story reads that Time Warner and Viacom are talking directly to advertisers about getting them to pay for measured improvements in their brand. In the process they will bypass Nielsen and effectively break its US monopoly on advertisement pricing. At least in principle – because Nielsen holds sway with thousands of agencies who buy TV advertising time – and they will still look to its ratings system for large parts of US ad sales for some time to come.
The principle is that instead of focusing on how many people saw the advert, the advertisers want to charge for the net change in consumer behavior or how often consumers respond to the ads interactively.
It may well be in such talks, but you can be sure that one side wants to charge more for the advertising and the other side figures it could mean paying less, and until they have a definitive deal, it remains conjecture.
But the internet is slowly shifting all advertising to be based on per click (response) rather than per impression, and this is intended to make TV just another responsive media.
At the heart of this is the fact that online viewing statistics are considered less reliable, or at least they are so different from TV viewing that when you prove there are a number of views, there is no predictable brand shift.
So viewing on a small device is considered less good for advertisers. Slowly audience data is shifting to simplify decisions, how many screens were pointed at this content when it played, and given the level of consumer engagement, how engrossed were they in the content when a given ad came on. This last bit is really hard to measure – streams can be counted over CDNs, but in the same way that in many US home with 4 TVs they may all be on, but only two people are in the house, if you up that problem by a factor of 3 or 4 you have as dozen devices in the home, all tuned to content, when maybe two or three people are there – which ones were watched becomes really hard to measure.
The Nielsen people meter is universally loathed, where everyone flips a switch when they come into the room, and someone records what channel the TV is on – that just can’t tally in a household where maybe three people are in the sitting room, but although they may ostensibly be watching the TV, they may also be spending more time on a small screen of their own. Advertisers shouldn’t be asked to pay for ALL of the screens that are showing video adverts, when the consumer can only watch one screen at a time, or graze between two screens with partial engagement.
So coming at the issue from the other way – how much more product did I ship due to this campaign, or how many people pressed a button to come to my promotional site during the campaign, seems to make sense as the basis for payment. But that’s before people sit in a room and try to put financial numbers on it.
Turner is thought to have made offers based on lift in brand recognition, purchase intent or awareness of a specific marketing effort. But this is more like a guarantee that it will bring you this improvement, for a certain price and Variety says Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Adult Swim and TruTV —would run new metrics alongside older metrics for a while to see how it goes.
The truth is that if the older campaign cost $10 million and brought a certain brand shift, then the same brand shift would still need to equate to a $10 million spend – what they all want to do is eliminate the idea of double coverage – spending more on a wider group of ad properties, to get an affect which grows sequentially weaker. Social media might be one measure, but if, for instance someone tweets about a TV program, does that mean they are more aware of the product? It might mean that, but it may be just something to tweet when you should be watching the ads.
For our money, popular wisdom is that multiscreen advertising is likely to have lower engagement right now. But we’re pretty sure that if you test that, advertisers will find some incredibly well priced OTT video content out there that defies that expectation. And while bargains like that are on offer, many of them from new content creators, this type of solution really involves a net no change effect – the same amount of money for the same effect, when it might be possible to get the same effect with less, if it was cleverly distributed.
All of this comes, unsurprisingly, at a time when advertisers are cutting their losses and withdrawing from the upfront negotiations, in favor of programmatic advertising, the automation of the purchasing of media. This has led to lower total sales and lower ad pricing.
Viacom in particular is one of the names mentioned in the Variety article, and it is not a surprise to see it grasping at straws after announcing it will take a $785 million impairment on under-performing programming.
It also said it would undertake a review of Media Networks, Filmed Entertainment operations and corporate functions, and will reorganize three of its domestic network groups into two new organizations and talked about promoting cross-marketing, expanding data analysis, technology development and consumer insights. Perhaps this move noted by Variety is one such step.
The door is wide open for someone to come along with a new paradigm for audience measurement, and we can point to another article in this issue about Verspective from Verimatrix as one of the routes down which we might head, in search for a Holy Grail measurement of OTT multiscreen video. That will mean staying with payment for each video watched, but extending it reliably to the new TVs of this world – tablets and smart phones.