YouTube and connected TV are hot media channels, but they’re also among the ad market’s most impenetrable black boxes.
Making matters more complicated for marketers is that viewers are increasingly watching YouTube via CTV, where measurement signals are even scarcer than on the web.
CTV now accounts for 38% of all time spent watching YouTube, according to TV measurement company TVision. Meanwhile, YouTube accounts for 17% of all CTV watch time, making it the most-watched CTV app.
With YouTube’s CTV viewership growing, TVision and attention measurement company Playground XYZ announced a partnership on Thursday to measure attention on YouTube’s CTV app and fill in some data blanks for advertisers.
Going around the black box
Both TVision and Playground XYZ can measure the attention viewers pay to ads via opt-in panels. TVision contributes the CTV data, and Playground XYZ contributes the web and mobile data. Together, this provides an actionable measurement signal for marketers so they don’t have to rely on YouTube or Google.
The new partnership combines their panel data and uses the attention-scoring capability within Playground’s Attention Intelligence Platform as a shared resource. The combined data set is available to any of Playground XYZ’s clients through the company’s dashboard.
Because both companies also measure attention in several other media channels, the combined attention scoring can be used to compare YouTube campaign performance to linear TV, as well as other CTV apps and even mobile, said TVision CEO Yan Liu.
In addition, there’s also a cross-channel component for measuring performance by device type, because together the companies can measure YouTube on CTV, mobile and desktop, said Playground XYZ CEO Rob Hall.
The partnership is already producing some interesting cross-channel findings. For example, TVision found that viewers are 14% more attentive on average when watching a CTV app than they are when watching linear TV. And viewers are 74% more likely to watch CTV with another person than they are when watching linear TV.
Playground XYZ also found that YouTube’s bumper and non-skippable ad formats receive 25% less attention on CTV devices – meaning smart TVs – than on other devices. That’s likely because viewers typically leave the room or pay attention to their mobile devices during ad breaks when they’re watching on their TV.
Such insights can help advertisers with campaign optimization based on device type, Hall said. Playground XYZ’s dashboard breaks down attention data using parameters such as targeting method, ad creative, ad format, time of day and day of the week, all of which can be used to direct spend toward the tactics and strategies that garner the most attention.
The TrueView on attention standardization
One thing the partnership won’t help marketers measure, however, is campaign performance across YouTube’s TrueView audience extension and its network of third-party Google Video Partner (GVP) sites.
That’s because the partnership is only suited for measuring in-app YouTube ad inventory, which is equivalent to a user visiting youtube.com. TrueView also includes off-site ad inventory from the GVP network.
And, unfortunately, the lack of standardization in attention metrics across vendors means it isn’t easy to compare YouTube inventory to GVP inventory.
Even if an advertiser used Playground XYZ and TVision to measure YouTube inventory and another attention vendor to measure off-site inventory, comparing the data would be like comparing apples to oranges, Hall said.
To get a holistic picture of attention across YouTube’s audience extension network would require more standardization and cooperation between measurement vendors.
But the partnership between TVision and Playground XYZ is a productive first step toward shedding more light into YouTube.
“Measurement companies need to work together to provide as much data as possible to brands,” Liu said. “Because even if Google has some data, they’re not sharing all that data back to the clients.”
