LONDON – Technology companies that sell advertising such as Google and Facebook jealously guard their user data in their own walled gardens, making it difficult for brands measure cross-platform exposure to advertising. These walled gardens have multiplied as traditional media companies distribute video content direct to consumers through streaming apps.
“Audience behavior is clearly fragmented across multiple channels, and the silo measurement that we have seen in the past is deemed really unacceptable,” Paul Goode, senior vice president of partnerships at Comscore, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews.
“Advertisers are very vocal at their discontent. It’s not surprising,” Goode said. “We have a media measurement landscape that is funded by media silos and therefore there is no incentive for those media silos to overlap.”
With advertisers clamoring for better measurement methods, newer cross-platform solutions are emerging and continually being tested.
“We’re seeing a change now with the advertisers both being vocal but also putting money on the table that we’re starting to see cross-media measurement come to fruition, but that then causes challenges for us on the media measurement side,” Goode said.
Traditional linear television for decades was measured by companies such as Nielsen that recruited viewers to chronicle their viewing habits. Some of these methods have been criticized as consumers spend more time with other platforms such as streaming.
“We had panel-based measurement up until the sort of the 2000s. And by early 2000, mid-2000s, it was apparent that this was not going to work in a world of increasing fragmentation and addressability of advertising,” Goode said. “We moved to bringing the census data in so that we could check against the data logs of the media owners. But it was still panel-centric and we were just using the census data to correct and calibrate the panel.”
Still, there are deficiencies in these methods, requiring further adjustments with cross-media measurement.
“That’s required us to shift now to a census-based and a census-centric place, but using the panel to calibrate and correct for weaknesses in the census data,” Goode said.
Comscore is rolling out different versions of its latest measurement methods, including Origin in the United Kingdom and Aquila in the United States.
“This is getting tested and rolled out, so we will see the products of this being delivered to advertisers,” Goode said.
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