Commentary
Cross-Media Measurement: How About Never -- Is Never Good For You?
- by Tony Jarvis , Op-Ed Contributor, September 23, 2021
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 …
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Tony,One of the big issues seems to be getting "accurate" cross media reach figures. But think about it. If you are able to estimate---or tabulate---the individual reach levels of your TV schedule and your radio schedule and a digital video schedule as being 60% , 55% and 35%, respectively, getting a fix on their combined reach---not to be confused with the ads beeing seen or heard----is pretty simple. You don't need a $ trillion national panel of 10 million homes get come up with a workable answer. It can't be less than 60% as that's the highest figure for any of the three components and it can't be higher than 100%---so you are estimating how much of the missing 40% does radio or digital video add to the TV reach. If you use the long established random dumplication formula this tells you that TV plus radio gets you an 82 reach while adding digital video brings it up to 88%. Now how far off would those estimates be compared to the actual findings of a $ trillion panel study? Probably not more than .3. Ah, you may say, but what about much smaller buys---like TV getting only a 2.5 reach and radio only 1.7 and digital video .2?The random probablity estimate for such a media mix is 3.9. Horrors! What if the "real" figure is 4.0 --or even worse, what it the "real figure is 4.1?---based on our $ trillion panel's findings? Woe is us? Have we doomed our ad campaign to failure? Or does it make the slightest difference. Think about it---why all of the fuss about cross media audience duplication? Is that really the big problem? If we spend huge sums to get a panel's answers---which may or may not be accurate anyway---are we accomplishing anything?
Thanks Tony and Ed.
Calibration panels to generate cross-media reach is a suitable and robust enough method to do media planning.
However, there are two 'misses' in that method. The first is that we don't have any robust post-campaign reach data delivery method. Take for example children's media usage (I use that as many Privacy Laws forbid Under 14s). We have pretty good transparency for TV and magazines but not much more. Applying an 'average' reach model where there are millions of options such as online is likely to be very misleading. The wide behavioural variations between male/female, 6-year-old vs. 10-year-old etc. would mean that reach would regress to the mean when the strength of online advertising is provide laser-focus targetting.
The second is in order to provide a sufficiently usable and meaningful calibration panel would mean millions upon millions of panelists, and given the immediacy of the electronic media it would ideally need to be daily and at least weekly. The number of permutations would be massive and would probably be the day-after the day-after the day of the ad. Bring on quantum computing. A 'deliverable' calibration panel would probably not provide the precision that the advertiser, agency and media owner would be looking for. So who would back such a blunt instrument?