On the spectrum of ad-tech bold moves, it has to rank high. Last week, NBCUniversal announced it would create nothing less than “the industry’s first unified advertising metric”.
So-called CFlight is a new measurement metric that aims to give advertisers a total sense of campaign viewership across screens, creating a new currency and offering guarantees of campaign performance in the company’s programming.
“If you look at how viewers watch premium content today, they’re viewing it on all different screens,” NBCUniversal’s lifestyle and Hispanic ad sales group EVP Laura Molen tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
But that has posed a challenge for companies like hers: “We’re not getting credit for so many things including co-viewing and digital or all screens viewership across the board.”
CFlight means NBCU is going customer in its bid to demonstrate, to advertisers, a higher rate of aggregate viewership than recorded by many other yardsticks. It will encompass viewing across live, on-demand, broadcast and other digital methods.
“We’re seeing that up to 15% of viewership is being lost or now being captured across all these different screens,” Molen laments.
So how will CFlight work? Molen says it will take data from a number of different measurement sources, helping advertisers project viewership but also to measure actual impressions after a show and an ad have aired.
NBCU’s announcement came after years in which measurement agencies have launched new services aimed at measuring consumers’ viewing across devices.
“We’ve been working with the measurement companies and really we’re hoping that someone would come and there’d be one way to measure it. Nothing was coming to the forefront,” she adds.
So Molen says there was “overwhelming consensus” at ad agencies and marketers that there was a need for something new.
