• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 26, 2016

Standard Media Index is introducing a new modeling technique that will give the ad industry full market transparency of the national TV advertising marketplace. SMI, which pools data from actual media buys processed through Mediaocean’s payment systems for agencies representing 70% of U.S. media buys, will utilize the new technique to model the balance of ad spending to produce what it calls “full market” coverage of the national TV advertising marketplace.

The method, which was unveiled recently at the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual Audience Measurement Conference in New York, is a methodological solution for filling a big gap in SMI’s agency pool: WPP’s GroupM, which is the No. 1 buyer of media, including network television.

By mathematically modeling network TV buys from the rest of the pool, SMI says the new method will make its national TV coverage representative of the full marketplace, enabling it to produce reliable estimates on shares of ad spending by category and advertiser, including GroupM clients, to each broadcast and cable TV network -- as well as pricing by daypart, programming genre and specific programs.

Agencies participating in the pool will gain access to an important missing link, giving them more visibility on GroupM’s television deals.

While detailed data will be available to customers of SMI’s syndicated database, SMI will also work with MediaPost to produce new market indices, including ones detailing explicit prices of certain genres and dayparts of network TV shows for upfront, scatter and the total marketplace.

SMI is exploring ways to utilize the modeling technique to fill in coverage gaps in other media marketplaces -- especially digital -- and expects to announce breakthroughs on those in the near future.

While the big agency holding companies participating in SMI’s pool represent smaller shares of ad spending for the “long-tail” media marketplace, especially digital, they represent most of the spending on national TV buys in the U.S., so the modeling technique is deemed representative of full market coverage.

“For decades the industry has made decisions worth billions of dollars based on highly unreliable cost estimates,” says SMI CEO James Fennessy, adding: “This is no longer acceptable for our partners and subscribers in this world of increasing transparency and they have worked with SMI to develop highly accurate and granular cost data that, for the first time, is truly decision grade.”