Joshua Chasin

Articles by Joshua All articles by Joshua

• A Metrics Miracle in Metrics Insider on 12/09/2016
  

  Josh Chasin is a poet -- and he knows it -- with this twist on a seasonal classic:" 'Twas the week before Christmas, when alone in my house/ I was finishing shopping, with a click of the mouse;/Then I cleared out my browser cache, cookies deleted,/ In hopes of nefarious snooping, defeated."

• Advertising Works -- And How! in Metrics Insider on 11/04/2016
  

  Sometimes I worry that we digital cognoscenti can get so lost in the magic and elegance of all these awesome algorithms and Big Data assets, that we forget to take a step back and ponder the bigger picture: the actual people out there on the other side of all those myriad screens.

• Advertising Works -- And How! in Metrics Insider on 04/01/2016
  

  Sometimes I worry that we digital cognoscenti can get so lost in the magic and elegance of all these awesome algorithms and Big Data assets, that we forget to take a step back and ponder the bigger picture: the actual people out there on the other side of all those myriad screens.

• Inside Today's Digital Household in Metrics Insider on 02/05/2016
  

  There was a time when understanding consumer use of the Internet was relatively simple - way more complex than understanding engagement with any other medium, sure, but still relatively simple. All we needed to deal with was engagement from computers. There were no tablets, no smartphones, no OTT; your thermostat wasn't a connected device.

• A Metrics Miracle in Metrics Insider on 12/22/2015
  

  Josh Chasin is a poet -- and he knows it -- with this twist on a seasonal classic:" 'Twas the week before Christmas, when alone in my house/ I was finishing shopping, with a click of the mouse;/Then I cleared out my browser cache, cookies deleted,/ In hopes of nefarious snooping, defeated."

• For Best Results: Big Data, Meet Media Research in Data and Targeting Insider on 12/21/2015
  

  I've been thinking a lot about the deployment of Big Data assets in the digital space. Clearly, it is one of the most profound developments in digital metrics - and indeed, in our lives. The Internet of Things is already here; we can pay with our watches, and we've got Google thermostats. But in our space, I worry that there is too much emphasis placed on "Big Data," and not enough on "Good Data." Perhaps here the data scientist can learn from the media researcher.

• Rethinking Traditional Audience Measurement Through A Digital Framework in Metrics Insider on 12/11/2015
  

  What would a video measurement system look like if one were to zero-base such a solution today, with the tools we have at hand, given the measurement challenges we face, while unencumbered by legacy systems?

• Let's Not Forget: Digital Advertising Moves Products in Metrics Insider on 11/11/2015
  

  Lately it seems as if every article I read about digital advertising is about viewability, fraud, or ad blocking. "No one's seeing my ads!" "Robots are seeing my ads!" "Robots are blocking my ads!" It's enough to make the casual reader think the sky was falling. I'm starting to think we're all collectively guilty of "burying the lede": that digital advertising works, persuades consumers, moves products.

• Rethinking Traditional Audience Measurement Through A Digital Framework in Metrics Insider on 10/22/2015
  

  What would a video measurement system look like if one were to zero-base such a solution today, with the tools we have at hand, given the measurement challenges we face, while unencumbered by legacy systems?

• Rethinking The Single Currency Model in Metrics Insider on 10/16/2015
  

  One of the long-standing assumptions in audience measurement has been the notion of currency - and more to the point, of a single currency. I learned about the one-currency model in a very real way working at Arbitron in the '80s and '90s. We won one single-currency battle: spot radio measurement, where we competed with Birch Radio. And we lost one: spot TV, where we competed with Nielsen. But I'd like to offer a radical opinion. In the digital age, multiple transactional media currencies can, do, and will continue to exist. Indeed, they need to exist.

Comments by Joshua All comments by Joshua

• 4A's Examine Media Measurement Priorities by Charlene Weisler (MediaDailyNews on 10/01/2019)
  

  Ed--the migration to impression-based selling is, I believe, simply a way to include ALL the impressions the seller has available as inventory, not just the ones counted in a C3. If moving from ratings to impressions was merely a matter of no longer using a denominator, then it wouldn't be news. But increasingly, media sellers are realizing that a smaller and smaller share of the impressions they generate are included in the C3 coin of the realm. Remove the denominator, but include EVERYthing in the numerator.(Parenthetically-- note the parentheses-- I've long pointed out to digital people questioning whether they needed GRPs, that they already have impressions; and if they can divide by population and multiply by 100, then a priori they have GRPs already.)Also-- impressions measurement and selling can absolutely support target reach and frequency. Indeed the cross-platfomr tools emerging today (from my and competitive companies) are engineered to provide exactly that. Planners and buyers will be able to know precisely how many different auto intenders or frequent fast food visitors or independent voters or domestic beer drinkers they reached in Podunk, and they'll be able to generate a frequency distribution against this reach (how many in-target were exposed 1X, 2X, etc.) precisely because we are measuring at the impression level. As far as planners hesitating to intermingle TV and digital ads, what I see going on is an increased blurring between what is TV and what is digital. My family has a small place on Long Island where we've recently moved from cable TV to YouTubeTV. Even when my mom comes over and we watch Jeapordy on WABC, we're streaming it from a Google platform. Is that TV or digital-- or is it cross-platform? It's a broadcast TV station, and I'm watching it on the big screen in the living room; yet I'm streaming the content (and the ads) via Google.I don't know if that gets counted yet in C3. But clearly it should be.This is the challenge with cross-platform; we can't really think in terms of TV over here and digital over there. We need to think in terms of holistic and comprehensive measurement.Finally, on the subject of comparability, I tend to come out in favor of discrete line items in a measurement reporting tool, with each platform and creative length reported discretely. THen the user can decide how to treat the different line items (this also addresses duration weighting, assuming that one of the metrics is average second viewing for the spot length/platform.) 

• 4A's Examine Media Measurement Priorities by Charlene Weisler (MediaDailyNews on 10/01/2019)
  

  A couple of things.1. I think Jonathan is right about lmultiple currencies. Keep in mind that we live in a world with multiple currencies already; two of us can transact a deal in dollars, a different two in Euros, a different two in bitcoin. Clusters of buyers and sellers will be able to convene around different currencies, so long as buyers and sellers agree on the common currency in their transaction. (It will also be helpful if we are able to convert across currencies; how many Euros is a dollar? But that's a next level of complexity.)2. As regards other media beyond TV and digital (responding to Ed's comment here): I think when we as an industry conceptualize "cross-platform," there are two different phenomena going on that the term describes. One is the convergence of what has been TV, with digital; two things smashing together. The other i the fragmentation of what has been TV into different distribution channels, including both traditional linear, and digital:linear TV, VOD, SVOD, OTT, online video, etc. One thing breaking into lots of things. Increasingly, I think the cross-platform critical mass is around the latter; following premium video wherever it goes, and reporting on same in a holistic, unduplicated fashion. THis is not to say other media are not important; but advertisers have been spending on TV, radio, print and OOH for years without the industry grinding to a hault. Rather, I suspect the current existential crisis we are all grappling with is the measurement of what was once TV, and is now cross-platform video with multiple distribution platforms and access points. That appears to be the thing we need to gifure out, now. Once we do-- once we reinvent TV measurement as cross-platform video (or more aptly, coommercial) measurement, we can go back to the more mundane problems of determining how to optimize zcross TV/vdeo, print, audio, display, and OOH.3. One important trend worth noting is that TV companies (both networks and station groups) are moving from selling "ratings" to selling impressions. THis is inevitable and logical; it enables buyers and sellers to include all ad exposures, not just the ones that count in the archaic C3 construct. Migration to impression-based selling will go hand-in-hand with the rapid development of cross-platform measurement, because the inudtry as a whole is in the middle of migrating to a more addressable, targeted future.

• Q&A: MRC's George Ivie Weighs In On Duration Weighting by Tony Jarvis (MediaDailyNews on 08/05/2019)
  

  I'm troubled by the idea of duration weighting for a couple or reasons. Two of them are conceptual. First, Gross Rating Points have always had two parameters-- GRP is a 2-dimensional metric. One of these dimensions is reach; the other is frequency. If you multiply a campaign's % reach times the average frequency, you get GRPs. (If you reach 70% of the population an averge of 3 times, that's 210 GRPs.) Factoring in another parameter that gets at the quality of the experience of the impression (as duration weighting ends up doing) fundamentlly changes the construct of the GRP. Maybe that's OK and I'm just change-averse. But we've always used GRPs to count, and then other measures to qualify. And within a GRP measure, we've always understood that an impression was reaching one person with one ad one time; are we really prepared to enter into the world of fractional impressions?Second, as George notes above, there's a non-linear relationship between duration and effectiveness. Should a spot viewed for 15 seconds count as half an mpression as opposed to a spot viewed  for 30-seconds? Maybe a disproportionate share of the communication values accrues in the first 5 seconds, and a 15-second view should count 90% as much as a :30; we don't actually know. It's worth noting that in print planning systems, there's long been the notion of "noticing weights," where planners are free to assign differential factors based on size and placement of the ad. Presumably, conceptually duration weighting is getting at a similar idea, but for time a opposed to space.I wonder though, if the standard shouldn't simply call for (a) exact-second measurement of ads; and (b) segmentation of reporting by creative duration. That way planners, buyers and sellers would have the pieces necessary to take into account spot length and duration of spot viewed, with the flexibility to determine how best to take these things into account.On this platform, this 30-second spot reached a million people, who viewed an average of 18 seconds of the spot.(And of course we should remember that all this depends on the ability of the measurement providers to account for viewing time to the second...)

• Advertisers' Access To Justice by Ted McConnell (Media Insider on 12/06/2018)
  

  Good one, T-Mac.

• 6-Second Commercials Are Dumb by Steve Sternberg (Television News Daily on 06/22/2018)
  

  I'm not sure I agree.We tend to want to talk about things like this in terms of black and white; yay or nay. But I can see good reasons for advertiers to want to put spots in front of my 81 year-old mom, and in front of my 14 year-old daughter. The strategies for reaching these two ladies should in no way be the same. My mom watches most of her TV the old fashioned way-- live and linear-- and generally doesn't fast forward. My daughter lives on Snapchat and thinks "watching TV" is Netflix on an iPad. As her generation comes of age, qiuetions about 6-second spots will become moot; they are grpwing up with institutionalized ADHD, and very soon advertisers will find that if they want to message millenials and beyond, they'd better become facile at shorter messaging. As I think I mentioned yo you in a comment on Facebook, if the two of us were younger, I'd say that in our careers we'd see the debate about 3s versus 6s.

• Get Woke: Time Spent With Media Approaching Total Awake Time by Joe Mandese (MediaDailyNews on 05/29/2018)
  

  Don't be surprised to see total media time exceed total wake time-- unless someone is deduplicating to account for simultaneous usage.

• Republican-Voting States Drive Viewing For 'Roseanne' by Wayne Friedman (Television News Daily on 03/30/2018)
  

  Roseanne didn't find an audience because of its politics. It found an audience because it was-- and is-- funny. Indeed I'll note that the first of the two episodes packaged together as the premiere was the one with the politics, and wasn't nearly as good as the second one (because much of the air time of the first epiode was devoted to sharing character backstory and intrpoducing the new characters.)What makes Roseanne funny? It's simple.The jokes. Laurie Metcalfe, John Goodman, and Sarah GIlbert are all still great. I'm looking forward to more jokes, shennanigns, horse play, and maybe even another Halloween episode.

• Attention: Divided by Gord Hotchkiss (Media Insider on 11/14/2017)
  

  Of COURSE the Julie Newmar version.

• NBC Wants Media To Focus On Delayed, Digital Viewing Of TV Shows by Wayne Friedman (Television News Daily on 08/03/2017)
  

  Absolutely Ed. That's why the campaign needs to be measured separately-- because now we cannot asume ad is subset of program wherever program goes, so we need to track the ad-- where it does end up manifest, as well as here it does not-- separately from the program.As for whether a mobile view is as valuable as a linear big screen TV view-- there are different schools of thought on that. You don't walk out of the room during a mobile ad-- I mean, maybe you do, but the screen comes with you. And you don't change the channel, because that's not how mobile works. And while the screen is tiny, it's also 6 inches from your nose. Some argue that a mobile commercial view is more impactful, in terms of one impression and one pair of eyeballs.But there's plenty of research done, anf more to come, on the relative impact of a piece of creative seen on a phone versus in the living room. In no way does this need to be a mystery.

• NBC Wants Media To Focus On Delayed, Digital Viewing Of TV Shows by Wayne Friedman (Television News Daily on 08/03/2017)
  

  Minor edit."In fact, it underscores the point that..."Should be, "In fact, what's going on is that..."

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