With 78% of its viewing happening on living room television sets, Hulu has a big stake in solutions like comScore’s soon-to-launch Campaign Ratings tool for measuring de-duplicated, cross-platform audiences. “I would say that there has been a lot of progress” in cross-screen measurement, says Hulu’s Julie DeTraglia. “I will give the industry all of the credit because it isn’t easy.”
As the Wall Street Journal reports, comScore launched Xmedia a few years ago to measure and de-duplicate viewers across screens, but that product didn’t specify how many people saw the actual ads. Campaign Ratings will launch in beta this September, with support from nearly all media companies and existing customers, including ABC, CBS, Fox, Viacom, Hulu and others.
In this interview with Beet.TV, DeTraglia recalls a time when TV viewing consisted of just one screen “and there was a system that worked” for measuring audiences. “And then everything fragmented very, very quickly.”
While companies were figuring out how to quantify audiences on desktop computers and then mobile devices, “What happened in between there was that living room connected devices really leapfrogged, at least in terms of television content and other video as well, as being a first choice for watching digitally,” explains DeTraglia, who is VP and Head of Research.
As has been the case with linear TV, connected-TV viewing is a shared experience, which has measurement drawbacks.
“None of the data that had existed or the measurement that had existed took that into account. So we were never really able to get a very accurate understanding of the reach of Hulu.”
Thus the company has worked with various companies, including comScore and Nielsen.
“We have this benefit of having first party subscriber level data that we can leverage in a variety of ways, and one of them is working with these third-party companies to use it as a baseline for measuring audience,” DeTraglia says.
Hulu has worked with Nielsen on DAR side for OTT and with comScore on its vCE offering.
To achieve accurate, consistent cross-screen measurement requires “full industry participation, and some are more interested in doing that than others,” she says. “It just takes a very long time. It’s not an easy thing to implement or execute. We believe it’s important to live in a third-party verified world and we know that it’s important to our advertisers.”
This segment is from a Beet.TV series series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.
