In the Streaming Era, the Streamers May Know Too Much

Buyers want more sharing, and may not get it

When it comes to measurement, the TV industry finds itself in a really weird place.

The huge growth in streaming promises advertisers so much more data on real, actually viewership. Instead of relying on small samples and projections, in the streaming era, every time someone watches TV they leave a digital record. So why wouldn’t TV viewership data be better than ever in CTV?

Well, because often the best digital records come from the ones doing the actual streaming – which sort of messes with that whole independent third party thing that has historically made marketers and agencies comfortable shelling out billions of dollars to advertise on TV.

Think of it this way – in the past, TV networks really had no insight into who was watching what outside of Nielsen, or what cable companies were able to tell them. Fox couldn’t just say “Roughly 20 million people watched the “X-Files”” – because they really had no way of knowing.

Today, while Nielsen and other services report data on how new shows are doing – e.g. “The Golden Bachelor” reached 11 million viewers across platforms – the actual streaming services know better than anybody who’s watching what. Yes, Nielsen can put out data that shows that “Loki” is a hit – but really, the tech guys inside Disney+ likely know far more than Nielsen does. After all – they’ve got the log files and even email addresses of those Disney+ viewers.

Yes, it’s true that you need panels to figure out who’s actually on the couch at a given moment- and what their demographic makeup is. After all, as Travis Scoles, SVP, Advanced Advertising, Paramounts put it on stage Wednesday at the CIMM Summitt in New York – big data collection ‘stops at the glass.”

But to get the best, most accurate and complete picture of what TV shows are popular – and - thus valuable to advertisers – you need the media companies (or increasingly, the big tech platforms) to share what they know.

The question is whether the new breed of media/tech titans - will ever want to.

This debate came to a head a few months ago, when Amazon and Nielsen announced a deal that would allow for the inclusion of Amazon’s own data for “Thursday Night Football” broadcasts. Again – who knows more about how many people are watching a given game than the company actually delivering the game on its platform – particularly the one that has everyone’s email and physical address? In this case, Amazon felt like it benefited them to contribute internal streaming.

Then the other TV players freaked out – and Nielsen backed off.

Still, this issue isn’t going away. There was an undercurrent of tension/frustration at the CIMM event during a panel focused on updating the industry on the state of the Joint Industry Committee. “You cannot measure CTV with just panels,” said Daniel Aversano, EVP at TelevisaUnivision. “First party data is an important asset.”

Yet there was an unspoken challenge that seemed to be bubbling beneath the surface. While Amazon may be willing to share some of its data with Nielsen on a case by case bases, it’s not clear whether the likes of Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, Meta are willing to share their streaming audience information with brands – let alone the JIC. In fact, mone of these streamers are part of the JIC, though OpenAP’s Brittany Slattery implied there have been conversations. “We have had a lot of participation from companies not listed [as being part of the JIC],” she said.

You might ask, well, why do you need data pulled directly from streamers, when you can get third party information from the new breed of currency providers, such as iSpot and Samba. That isn’t so easy either –

I was talking to Havas’ chief activation officer Mike Bregman on my podcast earlier this week, and he gave me a sense how much data Big Data actually entails. “Just anecdotally, when we got our first file from Samba, it was terabytes large. And when we first ran the query, it took us like several hours to get the results back.” he said.

So perhaps this is a problem best solve by Big Tech – even if these companies are far from objective players in the equation. At the CIMM show, Mariel Estrada, Head of Video Currency, Omnicom, seemed to be calling for the big players to share their data directly.

“We need transparency,” she said. “We need to hold all of our platforms accountable…

“We need streaming data, [and some streamers are] not willing to share it. They are not going to fork over their most precious commodity. We as buyers are waiting for it.”

The question I have is – what’s the motivation for the big streamers to change their position?