Major media industry associations are moving towards a new coding system for all advertising and video content assets, and they’re calling for the implementation of a UPC-type digital media identification and tracking system.
The system would help improve cross-platform media measurement and make it easier to track assets across television, broadband, and mobile video environments.
The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) are now working on a critical next step toward widespread industry adoption of Ad-ID and Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) coding for all advertising and video content assets.
The media industry currently has no standardized, open method of directly associating content identifiers with the audiovisual content itself.
CIMM’s advocacy platform, commonly known as Trackable Asset Cross-Platform Identification (TAXI), calls for all sides of the media ecosystem to coalesce around unique identifying codes — similar to the ubiquitous Universal Product Codes (UPC) used in many other industries. These codes are provided by either Ad-ID, the industry standard for identifying advertising assets across all media platforms, or EIDR, a global registry for unique identification of movie and TV content.
Participating organizations that embrace the Ad-ID or EIDR coding as well as CIMM and SMPTE’s forthcoming open standard technical solution can better monetize video assets across distribution platforms, increase efficiency and accuracy of media workflows.
The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) represents top video content providers, media agencies and advertisers engaged in audience measurement for television and cross-platform video.
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is a professional membership association for the communications, technology, media, and entertainment industries.
“The transfer of content throughout the media ecosystem is rife with thousands of siloed, proprietary avenues that have resulted in massive inefficiencies, errors, and waste,” said CIMM Managing Director Jane Clarke. “The growing support for the TAXI initiative is a testament to the frustration with the existing system and a sincere willingness to effect change.”
As part of this initiative, CIMM and SMPTE formed a study group comprising CIMM members and representatives from media organizations, ad agencies, and vendors who are meeting regularly to discuss the issues and challenges, and ultimately, to agree on the best binding process to enact. The study group held its first session on Aug. 13, and the discussion focused on creating a roadmap to define such things as use cases, technical requirements, and binding technology candidates, all of which will provide valuable input to the group’s expected report. The outcome will be a key next step for the TAXI initiative and successful industry-wide adoption.
“We are fully supportive of the effort underway to implement a UPC type of embedded identification for professional video content and advertisements,” said SMPTE Executive Director Barbara Lange. “We are eager to lend our engineering expertise to support such an important endeavor and we are looking forward to evaluating potential technical solutions in the months ahead.”
Part of the group’s Charter is to author a request for information (RFI), soliciting input from the industry at large for approaches to binding IDs to media.
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