CANNES — In the old days of advertising, measuring audience was imprecise, but at least it was straightforward. Nowadays, measuring across media channels, and understanding consumers holistically across each, is a huge challenge.
But it’s one that might have been advanced quicker, a panel of marketers discussed during the Cannes Lions festival.
“The biggest challenge is that clients haven’t stepped up to the pressure on the measurement industry – it’s hard work,” said Mondelez International’s chief media and ecommerce officer Bonin B. Bough.
NBCUniversal ad sales chairman Linda Yaccarino agreed with Bough: “Clients haven’t stepped up yet.” But she said it has taken time for everyone to figure out the lay of the land. “We had to put our money where our mouth is and say, ‘we’re going to guarantee (audience) for you’,” she added.
MasterCard global media group head Ben Jankowski blamed media measurement agencies that are still now connecting the dots between device usage. “There hasn’t been enough investment and attention on the part of the research companies,” he said. “It hasn’t been a high enough priority and we need to ratchet it up.”
But AOL programmatic TV SVP Dan Ackerman said the pace of technological development had been a factor. “The technology hasn’t been there,” he observed. “… only (in) the last couple of years when there’s been the availability of data and the technology to apply that in the linear space.
“Now advertisers can take the data they’ve been using in digital for five or 10 years and apply that to TV. It seems nonsensical that there’s … $70bn (in linear TV ad spend) that hasn’t been pushed faster.”
This video was recorded at Cannes Lions 2016 at a Beet.TV leadership summit on advanced television and advertising hosted by Carat. For more segments from the session, please visit this page.
