LAS VEGAS – The term “total audience” doesn’t necessarily mean “total currency” to Turner Broadcasting’s Howard Shimmel.
While he doesn’t think the advertising industry will ever adopt a single currency for trading traditional television and digital video, he’s happy that measurement giant Nielsen is moving ahead with its Total Audience offering. In an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Nielsen Consumer 360 conference, the Chief Research Officer explains that Turner needs to understand consumer trends so that it can “make smart bets” on the future.
“We’ve had a bit of a partial view of the market up to now. We don’t really know where all video consumption is going,” Shimmel says. “But what I need Nielsen to do is measure all of the pieces right.”
The research veteran believes it’s more important for Nielsen to be able to capture every view on every screen than it is to try to impose a single currency.
“I don’t think the industry is ever going to go to a place of having a single currency, where we’re trading TV and digital in the same way,” he says.
Turner is in the midst of executing about a dozen of its Provable ROI deals involving Adult Swim, Cartoon Network and truTV, a model Shimmel eventually would like to expand to encompass the entire Turner programming portfolio. Provable ROI goes beyond simply delivering eyeballs to showing specific business outcomes.
“Our vision is that the future is going to be much more ROI-based than it is just the way the industry has been structured for the last 50 years,” Shimmel says.
Of Nielsen’s Total Audience he says, “We’re really excited about it.”
This video is part of series produced at Consumer 360. The series is sponsored by Nielsen. Please visit this page for additional segments.
