This year, NBCUniversal hosted its competitors on stage at One23, the broadcaster’s annual developer conference, which took place on Wednesday in New York City.
Why? One word: measurement.
Broadcasters may compete with each other for ad dollars, but they also need to work together to set workable standards for cross-platform measurement.
NBCU is one of the launch partners for a joint industry committee (JIC), first announced in January, that aims to establish a standard that can support multiple cross-platform video currencies by 2024.
But before that can happen, the JIC – which also includes Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Fox and TelevisaUnivision – has developed a unified first-party viewership data set that programmers can use as a “baseline of measurement,” said Krishan Bhatia, NBCU’s chief business officer.
Frenemies
The JIC is in the process of polling agencies about what buyers need in terms of measurement reporting.
Different buyers may have different KPIs, but all advertisers require consistency in their measurement approach across channels, regardless of the measurement provider, said Cara Lewis, chief investment officer at dentsu.
Once there are standards in place, vendors can start to get a little fancier with their offerings.
More advanced uses for measurement, such as cross-screen attribution or outcome-based guarantees, can be a competitive advantage for alternative currency providers. But until they can work together within a common framework, agencies won’t be able to use these alt currencies at scale, said John Halley, president of advertising at Paramount.
The JIC will share a progress update in April, which should include an initial set of basic requirements for measurement vendors and “a lot more agency participation,” said David Levy, CEO of OpenAP, the measurement platform that JIC publishers will be using to build the new data sets.
The committee plans to finalize transaction-ready currency standards in time for the 2024 upfronts.
A measured approach
In the meantime, NBCU is collaborating with numerous alternative measurement providers.
Earlier this week, NBCU named VideoAmp as one of its certified audience measurement partners so buyers can use VideoAmp as the basis for audience guarantees through the One Platform, NBCU’s first-party data platform.
NBCU also expanded its partnership with iSpot beyond demo-based guarantees to include advanced audiences, including targeting specific households and buying audiences based on real-world behaviors.
In addition to VideoAmp and iSpot, NBCU certified 28 other measurement providers with an eye on brand measurement and incrementality, including EDO and Samba TV.
And NBCU announced a brand-new category of measurement, which it calls the “context quality index.” This index will be used to measure the impact of ads on premium video compared with user-generated content, including everyone’s favorite: cat videos, said Kelly Abcarian, NBCU’s EVP of measurement and impact.
Data deluge
On the data front, NBCU used One23 as an opportunity to unveil “fandom-based” audience attributes that link content preferences with behaviors, such as viewing patterns and search history.
NBCU is adding a “huge amount of granular behavior data to [its] clean room,” John Lee, NBCU’s chief data officer, told AdExchanger.
When attached to a person-level NBCU ID, this type of data can help advertisers offer more personalized targeting.
GroupM will be the first agency to test matching its own first-party data set with NBCU’s new attributes.
On the programmatic front, NBCU announced that sports and other premium live events are now available to buy programmatically, including on Peacock, through The Trade Desk and Roku’s OneView DSP. NBCU is planning to add other DSPs to that list soon, including Xandr and Google DV360.
Last up, NBCU announced a new scheduling tool built with Amazon Web Services that will allow advertisers to optimize their liner buys in-flight, which hasn’t been possible before.
But despite all these bells and whistles, TV advertisers will need cohesive measurement in order to understand how their campaigns are playing out across channels.
