Call it a watch party.
On Monday, a group of national broadcasters announced the formation of a joint industry committee (JIC), together with OpenAP and the Video Advertising Bureau, that aims to create a standard to support multiple cross-platform video currencies in time for the 2024 upfronts.
Launch partners include Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCU, Paramount, Fox and TelevisaUnivision, with plans down the line to add other premium (aka long-form) programmers and collaborate with ad industry bodies, such as the ANA, 4A’s, IAB and ARF.
But there is one name notably absent from the initial list: Nielsen.
The committee is more than open, however, to having Nielsen pull up a chair, said Jim Keller, EVP of digital ad sales and advanced advertising at Warner Bros. Discovery, which recently inked a partnership with alternative currency provider VideoAmp.
“We’d encourage Nielsen and all of their competitors to participate in this process so we can align on standards, because the programmers aren’t going to set standards ourselves – we need a lot of different people in the room,” said Keller, who noted that he met with numerous agency folks to talk about this topic while he was at CES in Las Vegas last week.
Ready, get (data) set, go
Although Nielsen is still betting on a single, cross-media solution, the toothpaste is already outta the tube. It seems clear that the future of TV measurement will involve multiple currencies.
But while that notion is liberating for broadcasters and ad buyers chafing against Nielsen’s panel-based approach, publishers need alternative currency providers to be “working from the same script,” Keller said.
Although the specific standards are TBD until the committee convenes later this year, it’s not hard to imagine the sort of boxes that’ll need ticking. Measurement vendors will have to prove they have access to census data at scale across digital, a viable method for measuring householding and kosher data privacy practices.
But measurement providers will also need a unified digital viewership data set to work off of.
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Most broadcasters have close to 100 different distribution endpoints to consumers, including multiple devices and virtual MVPDs, said OpenAP CEO David Levy. And each one is a data source.
“One of the biggest things we can do to help enable new currencies is to provide them with a digital streaming data set so that they can provide more complete measurement overall,” Levy said.
The JIC will be able to create this data set using OpenAP’s existing infrastructure, including XPm, the framework OpenAP launched in late 2021 for measuring viewership across platforms, including linear, addressable TV and mobile video.
The programmer data set will go through a third-party audit (the committee will select an outside firm to work with soon), and vendors will go through a certification process in partnership with the VAB to make sure they’re adhering to the standards.
Those that meet the standards will get access to programmer data.
All together now
Getting all this work done so programmers have a standard way to work with alternative currency providers during the 2024 upfronts is a tall order, but Levy said he’s confident the deadline is doable.
“Yes, it’s an aggressive timeline, but we need to do the work so that programmers and broadcasters have what they need to transact on a cross-platform basis,” he said. “And we think that a big, collaborative effort like this helps accelerate things.”
The desire to move fast is one of the reasons why this effort is happening within a separate entity, as opposed to within OpenAP, which is co-owned by Fox, NBCU, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
“We wanted to make it easier for other programmers to come aboard, too,” Levy said.
But the joint industry committee setup is appealing for another reason: a level of independence.
While it’s fairly common in other countries and regions – including the UK, Sweden and parts of APAC – to have a JIC in charge of running the currency service, that’s not the case in the US, where Nielsen, a private company, has been the de facto standard setter for decades.
“It’s time to align on common standards together, which is how we’ll be able to move this industry forward,” Keller said. “At this point, everyone has a new way of doing cross-platform measurement – I mean, even Nielsen is evolving their product.”
The JIC will officially launch on March 1, followed by an event on April 25, during which the committee will share a progress update on its activities.
