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BBM Canada’s upcoming trial could bring us closer to total audience
It’s tough out there for planners and buyers. They’re trying to stretch their clients’ dollars onto as many screens as Canadians are now watching, but they’re up against a huge obstacle.
Their problem is we’re in a watch-what-you-want-when-you-want-how-you-want world, but that’s not reflected in the measurement system that the industry uses to value ad buys.
“It’s truly the bane of my existence,” says Valerie McMorran, EVP, investment director at Starcom MediaVest Group. Given the explosion of choice and technology around media, she believes the industry needs to get up to speed on the multiplatform measurement front.
She’s had it with the excuses that the consumer shift towards multiplatform viewing is still on its way. “No, we’re here now,” says McMorran. And to properly get clients investing in buying strategies for different platforms, she says agencies need accurate measurement “to validate and understand the scale of this technology and where media is and what consumers are really doing with it.”
Thankfully, there’s a ray of hope on the horizon. BBM Canada, the leading provider of broadcast measurement and consumer behaviour data to broadcasters and advertisers, will soon be conducting a trial around non-linear measurement that will seek to provide coveted data, including demographics for video on demand (VOD) viewing. “The agencies are looking to have more robust, television-like demographics, so once we get [the trial] off the ground we’re going to have VOD measurement for 18-49, 25-54, you name it—all of the [demographics] that we get currently from the linear side,” says Errol Da-Re, senior vice-president of sales at Shaw Media and a BBM board member.
As it functions now, the Portable People Meter (PPM) system measures live television plus seven-day playback by detecting an inaudible code embedded in the audio of broadcasted programming. Live television can be followed and measured on mobile, online and tablet as long as the audio code can be picked up (meaning a commercial hasn’t been muted or skipped by the participating viewer).
The upcoming trial will insert alternate audio codes to measure and report on VOD. “It’s the stuff that you go into Rogers On Demand or Shaw On Demand and pull down when you feel like pulling it down to watch it,” says Jim MacLeod, president of BBM Canada. “It generally has different commercials in it, which is why we have to measure it separately.”
By building in the new enhanced codes—one each for TV, tablet, desktop and mobile—the trial will give a more accurate number of total viewers that watched a show, which can then be broken out by media. Christopher Walton, supervisor of advanced television solutions at Media Experts and a member of the BBM subcommittee focused on the non-linear measurement service, says that will be a big benefit to agencies and their clients. “We can see this many people are watching on television and then this many are watching it online and this many are watching it on demand, and you can see what type of show is attracting that audience,” he says.
“We need it to be broken down by platform so we know the audience that we purchased.” Agencies don’t always put their clients’ messages on every platform, adds Walton, so it’s important to have accurate measurements broken out individually by platform. “It’s going to create a more holistic approach to measurement to follow along the consumer journey.”
This VOD trial may be a small step, but at least it is a start. And, more importantly, it could potentially be the template for future evolutions of multiplatform measurements, says Da-Re.
Once you have the ability to get a code into a program or piece of audio, suddenly there are a lot of things that you can report down the road, such as podcasts, that would be very difficult to report right now, says MacLeod.
While agencies and broadcasters agree it’s a step in the right direction towards more precise measurement across all platforms, the agencies are the ones feeling a greater sense of urgency.
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“Everyone agrees that the Canadian measurement model needs to evolve to address this changing landscape, but nothing seems to ever happen,” says Lina Alles, managing director, exchange trading at Mindshare. Meanwhile, research and sales executives at broadcasters generally have a more, well, measured take on how to proceed.
The reality is, it’s not easy to create a new measurement system or currency. There are issues of cost, technology and scale at play.
Kathy Gardner, vice-president of strategic insight research at Shaw Media and a member of BBM’s television executive committee, insists care needs to be taken to ensure it is done in an accurate and sustainable way in which the technology can be built upon. “I want to make sure we do it the right way.”
Breaking out the audience by platform to see how many people are watching will undoubtedly put some power in the hands of buyers. It could also lead to some big changes in the broadcasters’ pricing structures. If broadcasters priced their offerings based on accurate video measurement across all platforms, Alles says “it would be absolutely great because it would allow us to do some real precision buying and planning because we could really target the viewer the way we want and then pay for what we want or don’t want.”
Agencies today mostly only pay when an ad in a video campaign is viewed or engaged with, Alles notes. When it comes to TV, they pay for the show that’s viewed—not whether the ad itself is viewed—since the Canadian industry still trades on program rather than commercial ratings. She believes the new non-linear metric could go a long way towards making sure agencies pay for an ad that’s viewed on TV, mobile or tablet in the same way they do with video for an ad that’s viewed or engaged with. “It will be a much more effective way of investing our clients’ money.” But the challenge is getting there.
There are a few major issues involved in getting the trial going. Take the money factor, for instance. “It’s really costly to do relative to the amount of viewing that’s happening off the television set,” says Alles.
“No one has an unlimited amount of cash to spend on what’s the next best measurement service that we’re going to be going after,” says Da-Re. “All these things cost just a tonne of money, and just for a proof of concept it’s extremely expensive.”
Broadcasters typically foot most of the bill for measurement systems—somewhere in the high 80% range, MacLeod estimates. The agencies pay a significant portion of the remainder. Once the non-linear measurement trial is done and assessed, it will ultimately be up to the BBM board to make the call for the industry about implementing this service, says MacLeod. In the end, he says it’s a financial decision. “If we were to operate this service there’s a cost to run it that has to go in the fees and that’s very clearly a board decision.”
However, McMorran, who previously sat on BBM’s TV executive committee, points out that cost hasn’t hindered the industry from moving forward in other directions. Look no further than the millions of dollars it costs for the networks to go to L.A. to purchase content, she says. “But there’s return—they wouldn’t be doing it if they couldn’t see some business model behind it.”
McMorran believes the same thinking should apply to moving to a non-linear system. “I think [vendors, agencies and clients] have to understand that there might be some dollars that have to be put forward first… in order to get that learning and move the needle because right now it’s been stagnating for too many years.”
Alles believes Canadian broadcasters should take a cue from their U.S. counterparts in terms of taking initiatives and putting some of their own money towards measurement testing. During the recent U.S. upfronts, for example, ABC announced it will be working with Nielsen to do some cross-platform pilot testing around viewing. “That’s one of the big barriers is [Canadian] broadcasters have to put some skin in the game,” says Alles. “They can’t just wait for Nielsen or BBM to do this stuff; they have to say—like ABC did—‘Let’s do this joint thing.’ ”
While Jack Tomik, chief sales officer at Rogers Media, agrees that some testing around multiplatform viewing should be done in Canada, he notes that ABC is “a multi-billion dollar company in a mega-billion dollar market.”
He’s also quick to point out that a recent study said a mere 2% of TV viewing is done outside of television. “If it’s 2%, how much time are we going to be investing in measuring that 2% considering how wobbly the rest of the information is?” he asks. “Should there be some testing in Canada? Of course… But all in due time.”
That time is coming this fall, but Tomik, who was chairman of the board of BBM when PPM launched across Canada in 2009, says there are massive influences to consider from outside of Canada. “Frankly, it really gets down to the size of the country and the resources to do these things and we’re one-tenth of the size [of the U.S.].” He adds that “90% of our business emanates—in the ad business—from outside of the country, so the currencies and the decision process is going to be made in New York and London for Canada and it’s really a matter of almost waiting to see what they come up with and then installing that here.”
Whether Canada proceeds with its own model or uses one from the States, agencies here have their own ideas about why broadcasters may not be keen to move to a multiplatform measurement system anytime soon. “It’s the same reason that we don’t do C3 or C7,” says Alles, referring to the metric used in the U.S. that captures the average commercial minute ratings in live programming, plus three or seven days of time-shifted viewing, respectively. “We have the data, but it’s not what we trade with. It could impact their bottom line and their pricing model and not necessarily positively.”
McMorran notes that nowadays broadcasters can charge a premium for online and mobile inventory since there is limited supply and high demand. If the system were to change to reveal more about what a specific target is viewing via non-linear and multiplatform devices and what the duplication is across the screens, buyers would have a better gauge of whether it is really worth a premium. She says there could absolutely “be something lost by learning more” for broadcasters.
Even so, it’s not as if implementing a uniform measurement that captures multiplatform viewing can happen overnight. There are several steps that would have to take place between the fall trial and actually moving to the metric—if it does even become the one the industry ends up using.
“Right now, I don’t think the industry has the answer,” says Da-Re. He believes that what’s going to evolve from technology in the next year or two—specifically in terms of a device that will become the preferred industry standard for measurement—will “force us one way or the other.”
Canadian agencies currently have three measurement sources at—or soon to be at—their fingertips: comScore’s VCE, Nielsen’s OCR (see Nielsen and comScore, pg. 24) and the upcoming BBM non-linear trial. McMorran believes there’s validity in all three going forward, but the ultimate goal is getting to true multiscreen planning and buying with its own currency that everyone can work with. “Because we’re not talking about proprietary when we’re talking about data; we’re talking about ‘What is the truth of how consumers are viewing this content and how can vendors monetize that, and then how can we as media agencies plan and buy against it?’ ”
Whether it’s a measurement system from BBM or a third-party group, Da-Re says this type of huge industry issue requires “alignment from everybody that we’re going down the right path.” That means continued dialogue between agencies, broadcasters and measurement groups since whichever measurement service the industry chooses “is one that’s going to stick with us for a number of years.”
Or is it? While Walton supports the BBM trial, he says it might be for not two years from now if agencies are able to get into the Holy Grail of accurate measurement—set-top boxes. “We want and would prefer to buy off real-time, real data,” he says. “There seems to be a little bit of a wall there.”
But before agencies attempt to scale that one, it’s all eyes on the BBM trial.
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