Every new media age waxes nostalgic for the simpler media that came before, when it was (or seemed) so much easier to do business. TV felt that way about radio, the pioneers of the PC-based
Internet felt that about TV (and maybe they still do), and I’d venture everyone confronting the “mobile-now” world longs for the simple days of measuring the PC-based Web. The
question is, what’s the media revolution that’s going to make us pine for the simpler days of
mobile?
The vague answer is of course something to do with the Internet
of things: by definition, not a single thing, but multiple things. I think the media opportunities and challenges created by smarter connected devices will be multiple, too. Yet the three areas of
Internet of things where media opportunities are becoming apparent -- wearables, connected TVs, and connected cars -- share some characteristics.
Marketers are definitely interested in
all three of these areas. In IAB’s most recent Marketer Perceptions of Mobile study, about 40% of marketers spending on mobile thought connected
TVs would present a high opportunity for advertising in the next two years; 31% felt that way about connected cars, and 29% thought so for wearables. As these opportunities become more tangible, I
expect they will share some common challenges as companies begin to measure ads and audiences for each.
Redefining Digital Measurement Standards
As we move away from the
PC-based Web, fragmentation and shifting technologies will reshape how we measure media. Fragmentation takes several forms: more and more content chasing smaller and smaller audiences, but
also more different kinds of devices for viewing content, over more networks, too. Media, device, and connectivity fragmentation will all require technological innovations to enable the accurate
counting of audiences, and re-aggregating or defragmenting them, too.
Measurement standards from the PC era are going to need an overhaul for the multi-device world. On the
PC-centric Web, counting audiences and ads relied on cookies and standards-based browsers, along with an always available, two-way data connection and a fairly unconstrained client device in terms of
power consumption and data usage. All these characteristics increasingly seem unique to PCs and the world of Web 1.0 and 2.0.
To list just a few challenges:
- In connected
TVs, the tendency to “pre-stitch” or insert digital ads into the content stream ahead of time, rather than synchronously, raises challenges for companies that want to count ads using
IAB’s Digital Video Impression Measurement Guidelines.
- Devices that can receive content and display it, but not report upstream (which seems likely for at least some in-car
services), will challenge the digital measurement status quo.
- And devices like wearables -- often just accessories to smartphones -- may not directly transmit or receive data from the
Internet at all.
What’s Old May Be New Again
So what’s the new, new media measurement going to look like? Given the differences between PC digital and
“Internet of things digital” it seems likely that some new connected digital media will have to be measured with a degree of old-school uncertainty.
Clearly we can’t go back
to the halcyon days of TV ratings. When the next generation of measurement gurus comes into its prime they won’t believe the stories we tell them about a few thousand U.S. households
decisively determining what shows were hits or misses, and how much people paid for commercial time.
That said, media measurement in the new digital era will most likely require hybrids
between the deterministic approach (directly counting everyone that accessed a given piece of content, based on server records, tags, or other approaches), and the statistical or probabilistic
approach (extrapolating based on a closely studied and well-understood representative panel).
PC Web assumptions that we can know exactly how many impressions were delivered, or
exactly how many visits a website got, may not be possible when we’re talking about “unique wearers” or “unique drivers” or connected TV GRPs. We will have
to get used to a world where advanced statistics, data fusions, and pattern-matching are vital in saying who watched (or heard, or read) what.
That’s okay. People have done
business based on uncertain media data for decades. Still, this represents a significant change from the way we thought about measurement during the PC era.