The winner of this year's Erwin Ephron Demystification Awards was Artie Bulgrin, who ran the innovative “Project Blueprint” for ESPN, and brilliantly managed to get Arbitron
and Comscore to collaborate on it.
He recalled “our” mentor’s fundamental ad campaign reminder, “Frequency is crabgrass” along with, “Reach trumps
frequency” at Day 1 of the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience X Science conference in New York City.
In today’s massive media measurement and currency
upheaval, notably in TV/video measurement, I think Erwin would have added a rhetorical question: “Frequency of what? Impressions?”
Only if specially defined, he
would have insisted, because as evident from last year’s ARF event and industry parlance, the term “impressions” has become nebulous.
This is why ARF
President-CEO Scott McDonald asked Warner Bros. Discovery’s Andrea Zapata, “What is an impression? Not all impressions are the same.”
advertisement
advertisement
She demurred answering,
stressing the value of long-form premium content offered by WBD and the various networks. However, she was not alone.
With a heavy focus on media measurement, not
one industry leader explicitly defined impressions, their derivation or measurement.
The “multi-currency certification committee, M-CCC” (not a JIC) panelists did imply
their various currencies would be based on “viewable impressions.”
However, this metric is solely a device/screen measure that has no actual person’s or panel
measurement.
The Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Jackson Bazley and the Video Advertising Bureau’s Sean Cunningham underlined both the importance
of persons measurement, which will be underpinned by a calibration panel in the ANA’s crossmedia measurement initiative; and the critical value of estimating true reach and frequency across all
TV/video platforms and ultimately across all major media. Why? Because it will be the basis of reducing the “crabgrass”!
Advertisers, the ultimate media
buyers, are focused on campaign results for their brands. I believe Erwin and inevitably Bulgrin would remind advertisers that impressions not measured at the eyes/ears-on level at a minimum
cannot generate an outcome and are relatively meaningless. Consequently, basing currencies on “viewable impressions” metrics is going to generate a lot of crabgrass. It already
does.
The importance of Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation of any media audience measurement database or currency was a recurring theme. MRC CEO-Executive Director George
Ivie emphasized the MRC’s neutrality and independence from the M-CCC and the extreme complexity and painstaking work required for any accreditations. Based on extensive experience, he
opined, “If you think you know where your ratings are going, think again!”
Pete Doe, Chief Research Officer, Nielsen, reminded the audience of the fundamental
importance of a massive TV/video viewing panel when using or integrating the various big data media metric sources. The latter are notably set-top box information, aka return path data (RPD),
and automatic content recognition ( ACR), data. ACR & RPD clearly have limitations and biases on top of which they indicate content rendered or device tuning which generates “viewable
impressions,” and importantly, “should not be projected beyond their footprint.”
It is not surprising therefore that while Nielsen remains in
“discussions” with the M-CCC it will not submit to its certification currently. As Doe suggested, “Nielsen is very well placed to create the currency of the
future.”
Additional insights from the day included the observation that media’s “context matters” when it comes to influence on amplifying the
impact of the brand’s ad, courtesy of WBD’s Heather Coghill and MediaScience’s Daniel Bulgrin.
“The Challenge of Churn” on subscription
video-on-demand subscribers (SVOD) by Magid’s Mike Bloxham and Tony Cardinale provided a fascinating examination of how the success drivers are changing and now challenging the SVOD marketplace
in its fight for revenues, subscribers, loyalty and share.