Comcast Advertising, a division of the media and communications giant, reached a deal with VideoAmp to include aggregated viewership data from the Comcast footprint into its currency-grade measurement. The increased coverage will support local, national and cross-platform audience ratings and impression measurement to help media buyers and sellers determine their value.
“The incorporation of response-level data from set-top boxes and smart TVs makes it possible to have much more accurate measurement,” Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “That’s really necessary today because of the fragmentation of viewing as well as the desire to move towards more marketer-defined audiences.”
The more granular data can give marketers a clearer picture of their audiences instead of relying only on consumer panel data or broader demographics.
“It’s very clear that we need a much larger sample set, and the use of these datasets enables that,” Marcus said. “We’re beginning to accelerate the pace of innovation around measurement, and are finally enabling things such as cross-platform measurement.”
The goal is to break down some of the siloes around different audiences for traditional linear television, addressable TV, video on demand and digital video, he said.
“It’s important from a marketer’s perspective to have a unified view of measurement,” Marcus said. “Cross-platform measurement is a step in that direction.”
Choosing VideoAmp
Comcast Advertising has sought to spur innovation in audience measurement and cultivate more competition among vendors that provide such services. As part of the process, it evaluated a variety of companies before moving forward with VideoAmp.
“We started with requests for information across a number of vendors, and began to hone in on a handful of them that we felt had capabilities or developing capabilities in the area of cross-platform measurement,” Marcus said.
Comcast Advertising also was looking for partners that could handle large datasets to support audience-based impressions, a more deterministic approach to reach and frequency measurement and additional future capabilities.
“We’re starting to see a lot of announcements in the space, and a lot of new players that are coming into the currency/measurement space,” Marcus said. “That’s exciting because it is bringing more innovation, more competition.”
Media Currencies
As marketers seek to improve the efficiency of their ad campaigns, the ability to attribute business outcomes or other performance indicators to different media channels has become more important.
“When you think about the evolution of attribution, which we started working on a few years back, the goal there was to enable the use of the Comcast data to support attribution-measurement providers so that marketers could better understand the impact that TV and video advertising have on their campaigns,” Marcus said. “We started with a handful of partners, and now, there’s over 25 partners that are doing attribution.”
He would like to see more businesses providing measurement and media currencies to buyers and sellers of television and video advertising inventories.
“We think that having more choice, having more competition, will steer more innovation into the currency/measurement space,” Marcus said. “VideoAmp is the first partner that we have moved forward with. We are in discussions with others, but we moved forward because of their ability to deliver a cross-platform measurement.”
