Get ready for the messiest TV upfront ever

How do you buy and sell media when no one can agree on audience sizes or costs?

Here’s a scenario that could play out during this year’s TV upfront season:

• Network X, let’s call them NBCUniversal, has a hit show on its hands, and Nielsen says it reaches 10 million viewers per episode.

• But NBCU’s partner iSpot says it reaches 11 million

• And one advertiser prefers Samba TV, which says the show reaches 6 million viewers

• And that advertiser’s agency is working with VideoAmp, which says the new series (perhaps a Gimme a Break reboot) reaches 9.5 million viewers

• And one vendor says the show drives 2 million searches for brands on average

• While another says that show can drive people to stores better than anyone

• And the marketer in this case just wants to sell some soap

Sound fun? This may be extreme, or extremely plausible, depending how things play out.

For the past few years, the major TV media companies have been pushing for new currencies, and a way to break out of Nielsen’s monopoly. Now they’ve caught the car and nobody’s sure how to drive, or whether they should measure in miles, kilometers or gigawatts.

The fervor for new currencies may indeed lead to a more precise, more valuable roles for TV advertising. But there is likely to be lots of confusion and accounting gymnastics over the next few years.

“Multiple currencies are a good thing,” said one buyer at a top agency. “But it’s very convoluted. When you have different data, all of which use different sources, you're gonna get different numbers. It makes everything so messy.”

Digital media veterans are laughing somewhere over the pain of campaign discrepancies. Except in this case, a $70 billion market’s future may rest on whether the industry can get things right - and the ripple effects could even influence what shows get made. or cancelled.

Or, it could be all fine. It really depends on who you ask.

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Yan Liu CEO/Co-founder of TVision, said that from his experience, the macro audience numbers - e.g. total viewers - tracked by Nielsen and its rivals are actually pretty close. It’s when you drill down and look at specific demographic audiences - pretty basic stuff for TV - when “you see the gaps.”

For a given show or campaign, “GRPs potentially can go up or down quite a bit,” he said. “That's a risk, as it makes it harder for sellers to forecast and harder for buyers to buy.”

“All of these guys have to decide on what is reality.” 

Another buyer drew a different conclusion. From the various currency experimentations he’s been a part of, one thing was consistent: Nielsen’s numbers were always low. He cited Amazon’s dispute with Nielsen this past year over Thursday Night Football ratings, which Amazon found to be larger than Nielsen’s on average. “Amazon knows who is logged in,” this person argued.

So whether advertisers use VideoAmp or Samba or iSpot, they should be seeing bigger audience numbers for TV than in the past - which would add supply to what has been a shrinking market. After years of paying higher CPMs for a shrinking audience, “buyers are going to expect a discount, which is going to be a tough pill for sellers to swallow,” he said.

Indeed, even as both sides are touting just how Cumbayá things are in the currency wars, as former Fox seller turned investor Joe Marchese told me on my podcast, “The industry always suits up for a fight….brands measure their agencies on savings and the agencies beat up the publishers on cost.”

Digital media expert and revenue leader Scott Schiller predicted that marketers will favor a risk averse approach over currency innovation. “This is all about protecting business models above all,” he said. If a brand is currently spending at a certain level on TV, and measuring those efforts in a way it deems effective and trackable today- that brand will have little incentive to change how it does things, regardless of the hype surrounding ‘better’ currencies.

"No publisher is going to want to use numbers that show them reaching fewer people than they thought they were getting at the same cost and alternatively, no agency is going to want to show that the audience is bigger” Schiller added.

As Liu noted, some major brands may just say f-it. Procter & Gamble recently declared that it mostly cares about maximizing reach in TV, and wants to do so in the most efficient way possible.

Meanwhile, Liu, suspects that at the end of the day, the currency debates are about money - not the cost of ad spots on TV, but the millions TV networks shell out to Nielsen each year.

One brand executive predicted that some buyers will push for new transactional metrics, while letting networks pick their own third party source of truth in order to back into revenue goals. At the end of they day, whether revenue is up or down will matter most to sellers, just as marketers will prioritize their own businesses.

To be sure, not every is predicting currency armageddon. Dave Campanelli, EVP and Chief Investment Officer, Horizon Media, said that while some networks are very concerned about their ability to make audience and cost projections, others appear well prepared for the coming multi-currency negotiations. Regardless, he argued that media buyers and brands deal with disparate data sets, CPMs and calculations all the time, and any ongoing worry is ‘nonsense,” he said.

“Even today, we use two sets of Nielsen numbers, impressions from Hulu and Google and different demographics and panels. Short term it will ad some additional complication. But the bottom line is, Nielsen's not accurate right now, and we need to get basic impression counting better.”

Long term, these currency wars may plan themselves out, as hopefully the industry starts tracking attribution a whole lot better. Easier said than done.

“It’s where the industry needs to go,” said Campinelli. “But we’re far off from that.”

Until then, enjoy the upfront season.