The third and final day of the ARF’s annual Audience x Science Conference Wednesday focused on the underpinnings of “cross-media measurement,” consumer privacy (or is
that piracy?), consumer identity, and “approaches & methodology.”
To achieve accurate, meaningful, holistic media measurement across just video platforms that can earn Media
Rating Council (MRC) accreditation, these areas must be resolved. As Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard wisely stated at Tuesday’s event, any solutions must be driven by a
“consumer’s complete experience.”
Moderator Alice Sylvester, a partner at Sequent Partners, and the most recent recipient of the prestigious Erwin
Ephron Demystification Award, asked her expert panel on identity resolution solutions, “How close are we? We are not going to get there, right?”
Her
panel -- including LiveRamp’s Travis Clinger, Blockgraph’s Jason Manningham, and TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel -- all disagreed. They felt that robust, authenticated, interoperable
audience (users and/or households) identifiers, a cornerstone to cross-platform video measurement, is not so much of a technical problem.
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They did admit that while their
ongoing development is central to targeting, identity matching and measurement, privacy and consumer trust will remain an issue. In building a multi-integrated data set, understanding the level
of compliance and trust in any “matched ID resolution” within that set, will be fundamental.
Their optimism for interoperable IDs across various data
environments was not shared by Analytic Partners’ Mike Menkes or Real Chemistry’s Seth Duncan.
They based their positions primarily on the typical 30% opt-in
levels in the digital media ecosystem and the virtual non-availability of walled garden data from the techno giants and others. Overcoming the consequent non-representativeness based on the
exclusion of the non-opt-in population and users of walled gardens media is apparently frightening. The data, they suggested, “will always be imperfect.”
Menkes
also slayed a Facebook dragon from a presentation earlier in the day by the social network’s Vice President-Advertising Ecosystem Dennis Buchheim. Buchheim had suggested that based on
Facebook’s research, “last click” offered an opportunity as a meaningful proxy metric for a go/no-go decision based on cost-per-incremental-conversion for a brand.
Menkes categorically stated that “last click is not good enough” and can overstate marketing effects by up to 10 times -- also noting the differences between addressable and
non-addressable ads.
Buchheim, only at Facebook for 90 days from the IAB Tech Lab, made an eloquent plea for the development of foundational technology standards that
enable growth and trust in the digital ecosystem. He also expressed his desire for Facebook to work in collaboration with the rest of the industry as an ally.
Based
on his extensive tech/data experience and expressed personal philosophy of keeping the internet, free and embracing end-user value, safety, and integrity, I do not doubt he was sincere. However,
the entire presentation came across as a feel good, Pollyanna effort by Facebook that is the premier member of the walled gardeners’ club.
Forgive me, but anyone
who has watched, “The Social Dilemma” or has read Charlie Warzel’s articles in The New York Times on Facebook, cannot help but be skeptical.
As
consumer research panels are clearly not going away, at least as part of the cross-media measurement solution, Kantar’s Jon Puleston shared extensive work on significantly improving the quality
of even the most basic survey responses on demography and media consumption via improved questioning techniques.
This seminal work will hopefully be the driving force for
a special ESOMAR (European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research) committee of its Standards Council to establish best practices to protect the value of panel data.
“Calibration panels” are considered a critical element to any holistic cross-media integrated measurement approach and are endorsed by the ARF’s Coalition for Innovative
Media Measurement (CIMM). Their importance to the methodological and data mix was agreed by both Nielsen’s Molly Poppie and Comscore’s. Michael Vinson -- wow!! 605’s
Caroline Horner also agreed.
Paramount among the many benefits such calibration panels would bring is the ability to de-duplicate audience and consequently estimate
campaign reach and frequency, which remains a fundamental brand planning and buying metric.
So, as Sequent Partners’ Alice (Sylvester) went into wonderland, things
got “curiouser and curiouser.”
Her question, “We are not going to get there?,” regarding identity resolution solutions was, I suspect, rhetorical. What
the actual answer does for progress on accurate, objective cross media measurement is extremely worrying.