NEW YORK – The popularity of digital gadgets such as mobile phones, smart TVs and streaming devices that are capable of gathering reams of data about their users are changing the way audiences are measured for advertisers and media companies. To ensure that audiences aren’t being overcounted or undercounted, identity resolution is a necessity.
“It’s becoming clear that identity is the core grounding component of cross-platform measurement,” Josh Chasin, chief measurability officer at media-measurement firm VideoAmp, said in this interview with Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser at an event sponsored by Affinity Solutions.
Identity resolution historically wasn’t a major issue for researchers, Chasin said. Measurement companies would gather identifying information about people who agreed to participate in research panels, and then project the behavior of a sample group to the general population. These procedures have changed with the growth of what’s known as “big data” – or data sets that contain much more than just a name and address of a consumer. Some data sets have years of viewing histories for millions of people gathered from set-top boxes or streaming devices.
“We need to glue the device-level data from those sources to some kind of spine so that we can use it,” Chasin said. “Without identity, you can’t do big data audience measurements — and, the better you are at identity, the higher quality of the audience measurement.”
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