Industry experts Josh Chasin and Albert Lau identify critical methodological challenges facing currency grade big data TV measurement solutions and outline potential solutions
New York, NY October 31, 2024 – Television consumption behaviors in the US have changed dramatically during the last decade, making measurement increasingly challenging as the landscape becomes more fragmented and complex. With the growing availability of big TV datasets reducing barriers to entry in the marketplace, the ecosystem now operates across multiple measurement vendors – meaning different data sets, methodologies, and outputs.
In a new CIMM paper released today by the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), industry experts Josh Chasin and Albert Lau identify and review the methodological challenges currently facing big data-based currency-grade measurement providers, and provide guidance on how best to evaluate and address potential issues.
“The US TV and video marketplace is fragmented and extremely complex, presenting significant challenges for measurement and currency, across different platforms and devices,” said Jon Watts, Managing Director, CIMM. “Measurement vendors are working hard to address these challenges and are making tremendous progress, but there is scope to support their efforts through collaboration and cooperation. We hope this new study is a powerful contribution to the industry, helping to identify potential solutions to some of the biggest methodological challenges facing vendors.”
In addition to sharing their own perspectives in the study, titled “Solving Today’s Evolving TV Measurement Puzzle,” Chasin and Lau secured input from industry experts across the measurement marketplace – including representatives from the buy-side, sell-side, and each of the four primary providers of currency-grade measurement – to establish broad consensus about the key elements driving differences in the outputs of big data-based measurement solution.
With these insights in mind, the study pinpoints six critical methodological challenges faced by big-data measurement providers today: 1) assessing the impact of identity; 2) addressing footprint coverage bias; 3) onboarding, cleansing, and combining of big data assets; 4) metadata; 5) integrating linear and digital streaming; and 6) processes and methods for addressing coverage gaps and shortfalls.
“In today’s alternative currency and measurement marketplace, it is essential to not only understand what the new quality parameters are, but also to identify opportunities for the industry to collectively help measurement vendors address a new set of methodological complexities,” said Chasin, Principal at KnotSimpler. “With alignment across the TV measurement ecosystem, we can develop shared assets, and codify the most effective practices and industry initiatives able to stabilize and address some of the most pressing measurement challenges faced today.”
“With competing methodologies and datasets yielding different results for the same linear TV programming asset, measurement customers must be involved in the assessment and due diligence required to potentially onboard any viewership metric that would impact day-to-day business functions since there are no set industry standards or requirements,” said Lau, Principal, Analytics at DIRECTV. “In addition, all the key stakeholders like publishers, networks, agencies, researchers, and marketers, and measurement users need to push for metric standards that will provide consistency, projectability, and interoperability while providing a framework that can be scaled to accommodate media consumption and measurement changes such as the integration of non-linear TV data like streaming, addressable, and VOD”.
To address these challenges, Chasin and Lau recommend a collective and collaborative approach to benefit the future of the TV measurement landscape. This includes the future of identity and the scoring and validation of identities, personification research to remediate the delay in migration to alternative currencies for demographic transactions, a single industry-accepted source and taxonomy to mitigate variations in metadata, and the creation of codified standards for ACR-based Smart TV data.
As a non-partisan, pan-industry coalition of companies from across the media and advertising ecosystem, CIMM’s program commissions papers, think pieces, and perspectives from industry analysts, experts and thought leaders to provide insights and proposed recommendations on issues of interest to its Coalition members. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this paper belong solely to those of the authors and not necessarily to CIMM, the author’s employers, organizations, research interviewees and participants, or to any other group or individual.
About CIMM
The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) is a non-partisan, pan-industry coalition focused on cultivating improvements, best practices and innovations in measurement and currency, new metrics and approaches to understanding the value of media, and data collaboration and enablement. CIMM’s members include leading networks, studios, streamers and programmers, MVPDs, TV OEMs and OS providers, major digital businesses, agencies, measurement and data providers, trade bodies and consultants. CIMM is a subsidiary of the Advertising Research Foundation and adheres to the ARF’s principles of scientific rigor, objectivity and evidence-based research.
