“We’re living in a world today where we have billions of people that are generating petabytes of data an hour,” said Elizabeth Kiehner, global design director and chief of staff at IBM’s data-driven services sector, called IBM Interactive Experience (IBMiX). “Humans can’t keep up with the rate of data that’s being produced today. And this is only going to be compounded in the future.”
Kiehner, speaking at this year’s CES, has summed up one of the most transformative trends in the media space we’ve seen in the 21st century. Our increasingly digital world has led to heaps and heaps of small data points being collected by just about everyone: devices, studios, video providers, brands, networks, marketers, publishers, app creators…the list goes on and on. This great gold rush on data isn’t ending anytime soon. As Kiehner’s statement above points out, we will only see those piles of data continue to grow in the future.
And though data has helped to transform the art of advertising into a hard science, it’s clear that brands, marketers and publishers alike are struggling to manage the sheer volume of data to which they now have access. “We’re besieged with this data, underwater, in the dark cave, whatever you want to say,” said Jason Jercinovic, global head of marketing innovation at advertising firm Havas. “Whatever tools you can use to get some insights out of it, we’re all desperate for that.”
That’s only true in the digital space, however. The TV advertising space is facing a different challenge: there’s not nearly enough data to satisfy today’s multi-screen, multi-platform and multi-channel marketers. And those marketers are demonstrating their frustration (in part) by moving more money to digital advertising budgets. Television suffers from a major data drought.
“TV is the black hole of data,” said Ben Tatta, founder and president of data and analytics firm 605. “The biggest challenge and opportunity is solving that data void.” He added that what worked once for traditional TV in terms of metrics for advertising and audience no longer holds the same weight with advertisers or audiences today. “The prominent measurement system today is based on sample of .001% or so of the television viewing audience on a national basis,” Tatta said, referring not so subtly to Nielsen’s panel-based measurement system. “While providing top level ratings can be done using a sample, in our context, with our definition of data, it’s really getting as close to a census-based approach as possible.”
The data gap between traditional TV and online video platforms seems to be widening, thanks to the break-neck pace of advancements in cloud computing, specifically the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence in data analytics. “Data has become one of the most important assets as we begin to think about how to engage with customers, who they are and what do they need,” said Melissa Lemberg, global partner for IBMiX. “Doing things like tone analyzing, like through Watson, to understand someone’s personality and how you can best relate to them, that’s really changing the landscape in terms of how we can leverage data, how we can collect data and then how we can analyze to make sure the predictions we’re making about behavior, the offers and advertisements that we’re putting in front of customers can be more effective across the board.”
Logic dictates that with the increasing penetration of smart TVs and newer, Internet-connected set-top boxes, coupled with the slow shift towards virtualization in content distribution infrastructure and networks that’s taking place in the pay TV space, marketers will at some point be able to pinpoint viewer audiences as accurately on the television set as they can on, say, a tablet. The first step, according to Tatta, is to tap into the treasure chest of customer relationship management (CRM) data and set-top box return path data (RPD) that pay TV service providers have.
“With set-top box data you’re able to do things with measurement that go beyond just ratings. You can really get into measuring performance of not only advertising and programming, but doing it in a way that’s relevant to the client,” said Tatta. “One of the values that the MVPDs provide is that they have subscriber files and data that can be used for client matching, and if you get that on a census level, you get really granular insights that you wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere.”
Still, TV is at a heavy disadvantage in terms of audience targeting and personalization for advertising. Digital experiences are poised to become 100% unique to the individual. “We’re starting to shift back to that one-to-one marketing, to the point where tools are being developed so that Websites can be rendered individually,” Lemberg said. “It could look completely different for you versus someone else. We’re getting to that level of data.”
The TV space, meanwhile, is struggling to bring addressable TV to scale. “The future’s not evenly distributed,” Jercinovic said. “Data means different things to different people. The more knowledgeable you are about how to use inputs to provide directional outputs the better you can achieve those goals. As you continue to dive deeper into it, you can unlock more things of value.”