• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 8, 2023

NBCU's next new currency is bound to resonate with you -- because it’s actually going to measure resonance.

Amid a slew of announcements on new currencies and enhanced metrics suppliers being announced at its annual developers conference today, NBCU is also introducing a new metric that it claims will be the first to actually measure the qualitative impact of its advertisers’ media buys.

The new metric is called a “Content Quality Index,” and it takes both buy-side and sell-side qualitative factors into account.

On the buy-side, it factors traditional ad-recall measures based on the quality of the ads placed, and the amount of media bought.

On the sell-side, it factors the quality of the advertising environment and the content.

The combined score -- which NBCU measurement chief Kelly Abacarian calls a “single, persistent resonance score” -- is designed to offset the quantitative way advertising has been bought historically, which was its audience reach, or what Abcarian calls a “tonnage buy” that treated all media buys equally.

When you put the legacy reach metrics together with the new qualitative score, she says “you will get a truer impression of advertising value.”

In other words, it will be the ad marketplace’s equal to its historical quants.

The new metric, which is being developed in partnership with newly certified NBCU partner MarketCast, will rollout in a series of tests and market trials, with an eye toward deploying it for ad buys in 2024.

Read tomorrow’s coverage of NBCU’s presentation to learn more details about it.