LONDON, UK — Last time Malin Häger spoke with Beet.TV, she said TV was “super-hot” in Sweden, under-going a renaissance.

That was in 2018. Six years later, the Nordic Sales Director, Advertising, for Swedish broadcaster TV4 Media says things are improving further, with a new measurement initiative giving advertisers more insight into cross-screen viewing.

I spoke with Häger at Beet.TV’s London summit in December.

Measure together

“We now have one panel measuring both the AVOD and the linear TV,” she says. “So we have all the consumption in one bucket these days.

“We also have a very good collaboration cross media, but also with the WFA. So it’s a small market and we are doing well.”

In the last couple of years, after much collaboration, the Swedish industry launched MMS, measuring the viewing of programmes, clips and advertisements and providing viewing figures to the media industry daily.

Since 2020, MMS has a total measurement of video on the TV screen, the measurement captures all streaming via routers in panel households. Nielsen was recontracted to future-proof the currencies in April 2022.

In autumn 2022, MMS changed the supplier for its census data and switched to a single panel for TV and online video.

JIC power

The development was thanks to a Joint Industry Committee (JIC) operating in Sweden, uniting all sides of the value chain in pursuit of holistic media measurement.

To learn more about JICs, see the The International Association of Joint Industry Committees for Media Research (i-JIC).

TV4 joined Telia in 2018 as part of Telia’s acquisition of Bonnier Broadcasting. TV4 is a free-to-air network, with several local stations. a streaming services called TV4 Play and a subscription service called C More.

When asked what ad buyers are asking of broadcasters like TV4, Häger said: “‘Get your things together,’ mostly.

“They think we are on the right track, and they are also involved in the measurement, of course – they are involved in our JIC in Sweden and helping us out through the whole.

“It hasn’t been easy to get one panel all together for AVOD and linear, but we are there now. So I think everybody is a bit relieved.”

All-in

It’s an approach Häger suggests other markets should adopt.

“The power of having a JIC in a market makes everything transparent,” she says.

“Advertisers can trust it. They know the evaluation, they recognise all the KPIs, they can decide upon it. But try to get the MAMMA (tech) companies with you, all the global platforms should be in it.”

Sweden may not still be “super-hot” at this time of year, but, while other markets grumble about measurement challenges, the winds of change are giving Häger reason to be optimistic.

“The best time is ahead of us, I think,” she told me.

You’re watching ‘Looking Ahead: TV in Europe 2025’ a Beet.TV Leadership Summit presented by Magnite & Publica, in partnership with egta. All videos were filmed on-site at our event at London’s Soho Hotel. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews