NEW YORK – Each upfront sales season for television advertising in the past few years has brought more ways to set the value of media transactions, or what are known as currencies. These developments are changing the way that marketers and media agencies are spending billions of dollars.
“There is momentum towards the alternate currencies,” Bharad Ramesh, executive director of research and investment analytics at WPP’s GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser at the CIMM Summit 2023. “The pie is large enough. If you’re just measuring linear versus measuring all video buys, you suddenly have a lot more of the marketplace to work with.”
TV-ratings stalwart Neilsen is developing ways to measure audiences across multiple platforms such as connected television, and it also faces more competition from startups such as Comscore, EDO, iSpot.TV, Samba TV, TVision and VideoAmp.
“There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done, but the industry as a whole — the buy side and the sell side — are coming together to solve it,” Ramesh said. “To that extent, these are the most exciting things we can see.”
A key challenge marketers are hoping to overcome is over-frequency, or showing the same ad to the same audience too many times across live linear television and streaming video. Over-frequency not only is wasteful, but it can undermine a brand by annoying key consumer groups.
“We all agree, for instance, that TV as we know it suffers from over-frequency…We know that there is attention and there is reach being delivered by CTV, but it’s not always consistently measured,” Ramesh aid. “For the marketer to go back to measuring TV using the same metrics they’ve always used across this new landscape of CTV and TV is a big win — a big step forward.”
