Just days after a group of leading TV sales
organizations announced what they claimed to be the first U.S. JIC – or joint industry committee – to certify the “currencies” the ad industry will use to buy advertising, the
U.S. ad industry is releasing a study recommending, among other things, that it might finally be time for it to form a JIC.
The report, “Industry Perspectives On The Transition To A Multi-Currency TV Market,” which was conducted by
Deloitte, was commissioned by the Association of National Advertisers (4As), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) Coalition for
Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), is based on months of interviews with a cross-section of industry stakeholders on both the supply and demand sides -- including both advertisers and agencies -- as
well as “secondary constituents” including audience measurement suppliers and technology vendors.
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The key findings are more qualitative than quantitative -- and suggest
the transition is already happening at different speeds and with difference levels of engagement, with the major TV networks ranking as the most “engaged” and media agencies as the most
“moderate” and “tempered,” and with advertisers ranging across that spectrum based on how they view the role of audience measurement currencies in their business models.
Another key finding is that the “most advanced currency collaboration” to date has been occurring “across constituencies (e.g., network to agency) and not within
constituencies (e.g., agency to agency),” which the report notes has limited benefits to developing industry standard approaches and accelerating the transition to new market currencies.
Those two findings in particular reflect how aggressive the major TV network sales organizations have been in accelerating the development of ad-market currencies, including their own
individual efforts to “certify” audience-measurement suppliers as currencies, as well as this week’s announcement by the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount,
Warner Bros. Discovery, and OpenAP, which is owned by the networks, to roll out a JIC.
But JICs, which commonly operate in other major media markets around the world, particularly in
Europe and Asia, are generally understood to be tripartite and, if anything, controlled by the demand-side, not its suppliers.
Or as industry consultant Tony Jarvis noted in a
comment on MediaPost’s coverage this week, the OpenAP initiative is a “MOC, media-owner committee, not a JIC.”
“For obvious reasons, JICs are controlled by
the buy-side not the sell-side despite any funding disparities, and manage and deliver a single currency.
“JIC's often contract innovative consortiums to execute the currency
to achieve optimum quality and to solve critical industry issue and technical concerns,” he also noted.
So it’s also interesting that the ARF’s CIMM unit helped
organize and commission the new Deloitte study, because innovating the development of new forms of media measurement is part of its original charter, and it is now owned by the ARF, which Jarvis
pointed out has already held a special meeting in January 2005 that determined JIC’s are legally feasible in the U.S. and do not violate antitrust laws, as some had previously suggested.
Complicating the ad industry’s standardization of new market currencies is further complicated by the fact that it has also been operating under self-regulatory guidelines since
Congressional hearings on the TV ratings industry led to the creation of the Media Rating Council (MRC), which functions as a neutral third-party auditing and accrediting media audience measurement
suppliers.
“The MRC, obviously, will
have to get really involved,” Ashwini Karandikar, executive vice president of media, technology and data at the 4As told MediaPost on the eve of this morning’s announcement. She added that
the study is not intended to “deliver an end formula,” but was designed to “get the conversation started.”
“One of the takeaways from the study in terms
of next steps is to explore governance models, rearranging from collaborations to standards and accreditation to consensus,” Deloitte Managing Director Mike Dean added, noting, “Ideally,
that consensus model is tripartite – a full industry consortia or a JIC model.”
Asked whether they viewed the supply-side’s aggressiveness in driving currencies
forward, self-certifying them, announcing their own MOC, and or conducting market trials with individual advertisers and agencies was a good thing or a bad thing in terms of a more neutral industry
consortia approach or JIC, Dean and Karandikar demurred, focusing instead on the report’s key finding, which Dean said is that most of the collaboration and sharing to date has been
“within silos, but across constituencies.
“Meaning, between a network and an agency, but not between agencies. So in a sense, I think there is a lack of learning across
the sell-side and a lack of learning across the buy-side, as a constituent group.
Dean concluded that he does see the network-driven initiatives working vertically with individual
advertisers and agencies as “still positive” and “can help to set standards.
“Then those sides must come together in terms of finding common ground between
standards.”
While the study does not provide any explicit outline or timeframe for the industry to get to that point, Dean indicated it would likely need to conduct more
research and have more conversations to get there.
