• by Ted McConnell , Featured Contributor, November 10, 2016

How will measurement and currency systems adapt to the obvious merging of TV and Internet connectivity? It’s scary to think about — but what the heck, it was just Halloween.

Online, audience measurement is enabled by the simple facts that the screen is both smart and connected. A browser knows what it is displaying; a page is code, and can share information with any party the user or publisher deems appropriate.  

Online, content has embedded clues about the viewer. A huge array of browser and Internet standards enable broad participation by the online community in the gathering of audience and content-related information. Nothing like this exists in traditional television.

Online,  the “aboutness” of content can be declared, inferred from a URL, or derived from content elements directly by spidering or by code running on the page. Even better, the indexed Web has about 5 billion pages. That granularity allows (but does not assure) excellent insights: If I went to Phildelephiadogpark.com, then I have a dog, and I live in Philadelphia. It helps that most pages have textual information too … words.

TV does not. What does it mean about me if I watched “The Big Bang Theory”? Does that make me likely to buy anything in particular? Meh.

“Advanced” TV

Surprisingly, the problem of knowing what someone saw, never mind the implied meaning of that, gets more difficult in the world of "advanced TV. "  To start, any black box (Roku, TV, AppleTV, set top) is blind to what any other box is doing, and consumers switch between them as fast as you can say “HDMI-3.” The app might know, but does not share its data.  This makes for huge blind spots.

So, how do intermediary boxes know what’s showing? One method is called automatic content recognition (ACR). Think of it as Shazam for video. This is implemented sporadically, and the device decoding the stream gets to decide who receives the data. It’s nowhere near being a standard, but maybe it should be.

ACR works for ad content, too. So it’s possible to know what ad was showing in what content, but the device capturing the stream may or may not take the trouble to run ACR on both, and ACR fingerprints may not be available for both anyway.

For some addressable TV, and any streaming TV, advertising can be dynamically inserted. Traditional TV measurement systems assume that everyone watching a given show at a given time on a given network will see the same ads. That assumption breaks with dynamic insertion.  In five years, any ad will show up on any device at any time, for any reason.  

So who knows where your ad went?

The answer is: At least, whoever put it there. That’s usually the app (Hulu), but might be the set-top box, or content provider, or even an app platform (e.g., Roku).

See the problem? The app knows where the ad went (maybe), but not too much about who saw it.  The TV (or any device) itself might know a lot of what was watched by someone, but there are dozens of devices and device types, and nothing standard.  Campaign totals can’t be independently verified except via sampling, and sampling is made unreliable by dynamic insertion and an infinite selection of content. Just like the Web, except on the Web we have common standards.

The result: we have dozens of half-blind foxes guarding dozens of henhouses. Black box providers and apps are little walled gardens.  This will make communication planning and buying harder, and, unchecked, throw accountability back to the Stone Age.

Where to?

I feel certain that measurement companies are working hard on finding solutions, but they are caught in the chaos, too. Solutions exist, but they will require both investment and industry collaboration. The downside risks are complexity and erosion of trust — like we need more of that?

TV and online media are now merging. The optimistic scenario gives us the best of both worlds, and the pessimistic scenario is a train wreck. We have the technology, but the scope of the problem (technology, internet, broadcast, cable, content, devices, supply chain, privacy regulation, and data) defies cohesive leadership. The industry needs to rally around a common vision. Advertisers have the most to lose — so, in the search for leadership, I’d start there.