TV loves to get in its own way

Brands want to measure ads everywhere, but media companies keep making it harder

The TV industry has been on a multi-year quest to make it possible to better measure the audience it delivers for advertisers.

Yet it often feels like it deliberately tries to make that quest harder.

Take the excellent Jack Neff piece in Ad Age this week. Nielsen is looking to incorporate first party data from streaming companies into its audience measurement data - and not everybody is happy.

The growth of CTV has shifted the dynamic between third party research firms and big TV companies - permanently. After years of being at the metric firms’ mercy (really, just Nielsen), now the TV guys have some - or a lot in some cases- direct knowledge of how many people are watching their shows and seeing their ads. Nobody at NBC really had any clue how many people watched Frasier until Nielsen weighed in. But when the company streamed a Chiefs playoff game in January on Peacock, it knew a lot about how big that audience was.

Thanks to its ad tech partners, NBCU could see how many streams of the game were being delivered, and which logged-in users were watching when. You could argue NBCU knew even more about this audience than any of the third parties, all of whom boast of big data, but don’t necessarily get to see any one streamer’s log files.

Of course, Peacock is just one example. Amazon can surely see how many prime users watch NFL games on Thursday nights -something the company has scuffled with Nielsen about. Netflix definitely knows how big the audience is whenever Love is Blind hits - even though they crave the third party validation that a Nielsen provides.

At least for now.

The more that TV is delivered over the internet via streaming platforms that have logged-in subscribers, the more that you’d think that third party researchers like Nielsen, comScore and the like are going to need data from the very companies they track to get it right. Yet many of the big TV players seem to be resisting this, or at least making it difficult.

As Ad Age noted, several of the big TV conglomerates could conceivably use the Joint Industry Committee as a means of bringing streaming data to third party research - but alas, many of the top streamers aren’t part of the JIC. Nor is Nielsen or Disney for that matter.

It’s seems that the biggest TV players want it both ways - they want to scrutinize and validate third party measurement firms, while also taking things into their own hands when it suits them.
Take TelevisaUnivion. The company has been very vocal about its desire for better third party measurement, arguing that its core Hispanic American audience has long been undercounted.

While pushing for better representation from Nielsen, VideoAmp, iSpot and the like, the company has also built its own audience graph, using a wide array of its own directly-collected data.

I had Fernando Romero, SVP, U.S. Digital Ad Sales at TelevisaUnivision on my podcast this week, and asked him about this potential contradiction - looking for third party validation, while asking brands to use an audience graph that only TelevisaUnivision would fully understand.

“I think once we understand the value and we show the value of lift to advertisers and agencies, I think that conversation becomes easier,” said Romero. “I won't say that it's a quick one, right? It takes a lot of research and insight that again, we are very fortunate to have because we know our mission is obviously to deliver these products, but we have to show ROI.”

“So I think once we show that lift to advertisers about incrementality of audiences, about price efficiency, about accuracy…” he added. “That language is gonna resonate.”

To be sure, TelevisaUnivision isn’t the only TV company with its own audience graph. Disney has one. So does NBCU. Here’s the thinking among network sellers in the Audience Graph Wars: We all know more than ever about our audiences, and we can sell you packages using all of this proprietary data - but we also want all these new currencies.

I found myself wondering if instead of better third party measurement, TV and tech companies may just need some kind of a third party data/graph validator to come along (which could be a good business for somebody).

Brands meanwhile, just want to be able to keep track of how many people they are reaching across their entire campaigns, and whether they are working, regardless of platform or network. They don’t want to optimize and manage frequency and ROI platform by platform. For all the industry talk of being able to achieve this ‘advertiser nirvana’ as one buyer put it, we don’t seem to be getting close.

I spend some time at a closed door event at iSpot the other day, and the frustration among advertisers (particularly DTC brands) was palpable. Several executives noted that they were currently unable to buy and measure across various platforms in CTV they way they needed to. If anything, it’s easier to do so right now in linear TV, despite all of its analogue limitations.

When your answer to digital advertising isn’t delivering as well as your legacy, supposedly-dying product, well, that’s not a great place to be.