In the last few years, digital publishers have forged ahead with advertisers because their ability to count and prove accurate numbers of viewers and readers has been music to ad buyers’ years.
But TV will soon catch up, giving them better parity with digital providers, says a local broadcast owner relishing the switch.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Hubbard, head of TV group at Hubbard Broadcasting, talks about TV’s transition from its historic method of measuring and selling TV eyeballs using rough “gross rating points” (GRPs), to selling on real viewership, by digital-style impression.
“Truthfully, we should have probably made this transition a long time ago because the (media) universe isn’t the same anymore,” says Hubbard. “Once we transitioned to some of our competitors selling on a different universe (we should have transitioned).”
Hubbard’s stations operate in locales including Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York and New Mexico.
But, after TV goes impression-based, Hubbard thinks discrepancies will remain between media types.
“Digital still has an advantage in that the rules allow them to have a much shorter duration, much shorter impact,” he says. “So we need to figure out a way to address that, and that’s going to be the hard part. The impressions versus ratings, that’s just math.”
This interview was conducted by Janus Insights & Strategy president Howard Shimmel.
The interview took place at the at the TVB Forward conference in New York. The series is sponsored by WideOrbit.
