Commentary
Much Ado About Set Top Boxes
- by Pat Liguori , April 12, 2010
In the world of audience research, the Set Top Box (STB) is being hailed as almost "the next best thing since sliced bread." It does everything! Want second-by-second data? You've got it! Want to see what happens during commercial breaks? Piece of cake! How about all of that fast-forwarding, muting, pausing and rewinding activity? No problem! STBs will slice and dice an audience to the point where your head is spinning faster than the blades on a Cuisinart! And the best part? You can have all of this for a FRACTION of what you pay Nielsen!
Wake up, people! Put down the Kool-Aid, because it's time for a reality check among national and local researchers, planners, strategists, analysts, CROs, CIOs, UFOs, EIEIEIOs -- and any of the myriad of creative titles we've dreamed up for ourselves because being a "researcher" is SO last century.
Now, let the myth-busting begin!
Myth: STB measurement uses a "census" rather than "panel" approach.
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Busted: STBmeasurement excludes HHs that receive signals over-the-air and cable HHs that don't have "return path" capability. Also, in some cable or satellite HHs, not every set is connected to the service. To not include these HHs is to ignore the tuning differences we know exist among these and wired or fully wired HHs. DVR tuning to stand-alone devices is excluded because it is not captured by the STB.
Myth: STB measurement provides second-by-second tuning data.
Busted: Not all STBs capture tuning data every second. Some capture every two seconds, while others capture every time there is a tuning event change. Therefore, although some STB data may be reported in seconds, it is not necessarily based on the collection of every second of tuning activity between two points in time.
Myth: The larger samples used in STB measurement provide a better representation of a market's tuning activity than do Nielsen's smaller LPM or Set Meter samples.
Busted: Not necessarily. In a DMA where a telco's STB HHs represent only 8% of the market's TV HHs, you will not get a complete picture of tuning activity, especially if those STB HHs are clustered geographically or if the telco's subscribers have specific age, income, or other characteristic skews that don't mirror those of the DMA.
Myth: STB measurement provides accurate data on commercial tuning and avoidance.
Busted: Again, not necessarily. While some STB data providers use information from ad monitoring services, other STB data providers may be "deducing" the times during which commercials air by looking at when declines in tuning activity occur. Based on the assumption that if ratings are low, it must be a commercial, this method fails to account for unanticipated schedule changes, long-running movie credits, news cut-ins, silent periods within programs during which Nielsen code can't be detected, etc.
STBs might be the future of video audience measurement, but as we learned from the recently released CRE STB study, there are many questions for which we don't have answers. For instance:
Is the STB able to differentiate between TV Set On and Off? Will modeling
Set On/Off provide the precision and accuracy we seek for commercial and program ratings?
What constitutes tuning? Is it one second? One minute? Five minutes?
More broadly, is the Web model -- having multiple metrics providers using substantially different methodologies that provide significantly different data -- the right model for
TV?
The point: much work remains to be done before STB data are used to plan, buy, sell or post. Our mantra should be "Do It Right" rather than "Just Do It."
It is too bad Mr. Liguori didn't make his association with Nielsen more clear at the very beginning of his column so the reader could keep his ovisous bias in mind as it was read instead of having to wait until the very end to see how a conflict of interest affects ones point of view.
Myth: Nielsen data is accurate
Busted: As a former Nielsen diary household, I can assure you that my accounting for what my kids were watching on the TV in the playroom was wildly inaccurate. I was also quite generous to the shows I liked and failed miserably to account for all of the channel surfing I did (pre-DVR, now I just zap all the commercials)
P&G reported last week that they get more brand exposure from the labels in the store than they do from their TV ads. Wake up people. The 30-second TV ad needs help. Pat is from ABC, so she knows the power of the Ty Pennington/product placement model. Get your product in the content of the programming if you expect to escape the black hole of the DVR FF button.
Pat is right on the money.
There is tremendous opportunity for using STB data, but anyone who thinks it is the single answer is missing many important limitations. One that wasn't covered is the issue of identifying WHO is watching. STBs don't provide that information that is extremely important.
There are a variety of ways to deal with these issues, but there is not yet complete agreement. As Pat notes, there is more work to do before STB data achieves all of its promise.
And, Dan, the Center for Research Excellence is funded by Nielsen but the committees are all led by research professionals, not Nielsen. And MS. Liguori is one the most respected researchers in local television with a tremendous store of knowledge and experience.
Interesting post. Hardware is cool. Gadgets are fun.
Effective and actionable measurement does not and must not depend on a hardware gateway or intercept approach. It’s too risky, and STBs are an evolutionary step towards a simple IP connection. And that will get simpler and simpler, and be embedded and driven by software *very soon* anyway. It's not hyperbole to say that STBs are soon to be as uninteresting as modems. And perhaps as irrelevant as wired LANs. I can’t seem to get this across to my friends in the audience measurement community. It's as anachronistic as panels. We use them because we have to, but we wish we didn't.
I guess what makes me cranky about the focus of this discussion is the inference that consumer behavior “on” the set top box as captured today is a relevant and actionable corpus of data. It's just not.
The bubble that needs to be burst is this concept of "effective" measurement of consumer preference and behavior, how far away it is from measuring or impacting the consumer experience.
Technology aside (and I will elaborate below), our many incumbent set top box data measurement companies (and *most* audience measurement companies) still appear to be stuck in decades-old (and completely outdated) approaches to “what the customer likes” and linkages between content, adverts and consumer preferences. In fact, precious little is being said about linking the consumer experience and consumer preferences to any bit of "ad campaign success" metrics. This is because it is not in the vernacular of most of the ad community ---yet.
That having been said, there are very smart, very creative people out there who are trying to ferret-out the actionable data that can inform what we call the consumer experience. We just don’t see them (yet) in leadership roles in the large enterprises currently dominating content delivery, ad placement (again, “targeting” is absent), and a term we have invented : “CEM” or Consumer Experience Management. *
(*BTW it has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with insight and consumer-centric focus.)
Why is the STB the wrong focus? What our industry (the advertising industry within entertainment) is failing to embrace is the elephant in the room: Ad preferences as a key enabler (not the only one) to optimizing the consumer experience.
It's as though the industry, unable to see (or probably) manipulate the linkage between consumer experience and ad campaign success, has just given-up, and regressed to what they know...as ineffective and archaic as it may be.
On the other "side" of the screens, the consumers are so fed-up with idiotically placed ads (notice I omitted the term “targeted”) that they work very hard to avoid them, including clicking that blasted remote one, two, three, four, and finally five times (to get the fastest fast-forward), counting “one, two, three, four, five” seconds to skip past the entire ad pod…
So why are we working against consumers? All we’re doing is making them open and eager for any alternative they can find. EyeTMedia’s CEM framework puts the totality of the consumer experience into the context of consumer control. We invite the community to come with us.
Technology has already presented us exciting options to resolve some of this, but we need to change our world-view. Specifically we need to understand that the key to successful ad placement is the pairing of a brand and a message with a consumer *pre-disposed* to be receptive to that message. That’s not as hard as it may sound. More precisely we need to use all of our smarts to move consumers from having ads pushed to them, and into a new world in which consumers believe that they are “pulling” messages towards them, and that they (consumers) have an impact on their ad-stream.
In EyeTMedia's Consumer Experience Management framework, we provide the consumer with the control that moves them to the tipping-point of "push" ads over to "pull" ads, in a rich combination of experiences and features that they (not others) control, invoke, turn off and turn on. It’s way beyond “social-TV.” It’s simply “personalized entertainment.”
Technology today is moving us rapidly towards an environment in which set top boxes are simply conduits for an IP-based IPTV delivery of content, ads and many other experiences that include what’s called “social TV” among the many “Apps” that will run on consumers’ big screens.
If you want to see the future of TV (and all entertainment), just look at an Android Phone “deck” or an iPad today. Yahoo! Widgets are a good first pass, and they will evolve or die. But the metaphor has been set by all of these in concert. And consumers are in control.
In Personalized Entertainment, consumers will “call” applications that help them discover, share, explore, subscribe and interact with content, advertisers, friends and family.
This will happen from any device. Social networks won’t be an “overlay” - - they will be organic to the experience, which is coming over an IP connection. The experience will be cross-screen… and will be seamless.
This is not fantasy. As they say “we have the technology today,…we just don’t have the will to do it.”
The economic model is powerful and yet somehow invisible or fuzzy to the incumbent distributors, intermediaries and even to the content providers. We would like to wake them up to the power of what engaged, excited consumers will bring to the experience. It is just a matter of freeing the content, and engaging the ad community (agencies, brands and ad targeting/delivery/placement companies) in real consumer-centric focus.
The warning shot across the bow of measurement companies is that all activity “across” an IP connection is measurable and interactive, if the consumer says it’s OK. With a “Personalized Entertainment” approach that gives consumers the feeling that they are in control of their experience, permission will be granted, and those service providers with permission will have an insurmountable advantage. This is what CEM is all about. Stay tuned for our CEM Best Practices White Paper.
Let’s encourage the discussion to move beyond the hardware discussion and forward from a 1960’s approach to a new millennium approach (IP connections, IPTV, cross platform, Apps – driven). And most importantly let’s spend our creative and data expertise thinking about how to create the environment that moves from “push” to “pull” advertising in a consumer-controlled environment.
Matt Weeks
CEO and Founder
EyeTMedia
mweeks@eyetmedia.com
650-520-8808
mweeks at eyetmedia dot com
Hallelujah Pat.
To add a few more:
* synchronicity of time across all the STBs if we are to trust in second-by-second data and not draw false conclusions from distorted data
* latency between signals (broadcast vs cable vs dish) that also distorts time
* converting tuning to viewing - how many and who
Matt makes some very good points in a very persuasive post. I would like to know his opinion on the nexus between targeting consumers in a pre-disposed condition (i.e. not all ads work the same way at the same time) and the fact that the TV is (in the main) not a personal device but generally a shared/family device - as indeed is the IP address. How can the 'pre-disposed consumer' be winnowed from the anonymity of IP address to assess effectiveness?
Pat, while you do a very good job explaining why TV set-top box viewing data isn't perfect data, you do a disservice to the television industry to suggest that folks are wrong to be excited about its recent availability at scale. There is no question that the TV industry's fixation on buying and selling TV time according to age/sex demographic tonnage as extrapolated against a panel of 8000 people undervalues our medium and does a disservice to marketers and viewers alike. It is easy to attack set-top box viewing data for how it is different than a perfectly distilled pin-drop of data perched on a microscope slide. Unlike you, I think that many in the industry are appropriately excited about the availability of actual viewing data from tens of millions of consumer television devices. The issues that you raise are only smoke screens. Folks on the web have been collecting, cleansing, analyzing and acting on much bigger and much dirtier data sets for years with extraordinarily positive results for the market.
Very true Dave - the online folks have been doing it for a decade now. And they are nowhere near getting useable data. As one simple example, here in Australia (with a population of 22m of which around 17.5m are connected and around 15m active online in any given month), the unique browsers derived from the "census data" is rapidly approaching the 90m mark.
While it is fine to get very excited about the prospect of large data sets (bring it on I say!) I agree with the underlying sentiment to not be seduced by such large data sets until those data can be properply understood and fused into a useable system.