Two leaders in measurement test new solutions for tallying ad views online
Although BBM Canada is trying to give broadcasters and advertisers a better understanding of how many people are watching a shows, it doesn’t provide any data about how ads themselves perform. That’s where Nielsen and comScore step in.
Their online campaign measurement tools can tell advertisers who’s seeing their ads and how often, and thanks to big data, they can do it much more accurately than TV campaign ratings tools ever could.
Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) uses Facebook data to measure online viewership of video and display ads within a campaign’s target audience. Whenever an OCR-tagged ad is seen by a someone on a browser that’s logged into Facebook, the user’s demographic information is collected, and at the end of each day, Facebook sends Nielsen a demographics report (with all identifying information removed to protect users’ privacy) about who’s seen the ad.
According to Nielsen, this means they can identify the age and gender of 35% to 50% of everyone who sees the campaign—a much larger sample size than was ever available with TV audience measurement.
Another of OCR’s strengths is its cross-platform compatibility. Nielsen’s goal is to facilitate targeted audience-based buying, based on digital ratings points rather than impressions.
“We look forward to a time when audience-based buying is a common approach across all forms of media, both digital and TV,” says David Wong, vice-president product leadership at Nielsen.
ComScore takes a different approach, which is less interested in combining digital measurement with TV ratings, and more focused on the strengths and weaknesses of digital-specific marketing. Whereas on TV every commercial shown is a commercial seen, that’s not the case online, where users can click or scroll away without seeing the ad. So comScore’s measurement product, validated Campaign Essentials (vCE), focuses on how valuable each ad impression was—not just how many ad impressions were sent by servers, but whether they actually showed up on a screen, and what content they showed up in.
“What makes vCE unique in our minds is it has all the components that a client or their agency needs to be looking at to make sure that they’re maximizing the value of their investment,” says Brent Bernie, president of comScore Canada.
vCE measures audience demographics much like TV campaign ratings tools do, using a panel of 40,000 to 45,000 viewers in Canada, but it also uses ad tags to determine whether impressions are “viewable,” based on a standard devised by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). To be viewable, an impression must be at least 50% on-screen for at least 1-second—the viewer can’t have clicked away, failed to load, or blocked the ad.
In theory, viewability also helps protect against scams, since in most cases where robots are used to drive up impression counts the ads either aren’t on-screen or aren’t visible for long enough. Knowing what percentage of impressions paid for are viewable helps advertisers determine which buys and buying methods are effective, and which dollars are going to waste on an inflated impression count.
vCE also allows clients using real-time bidding exchanges to identify and filter “non-brand safe environments,” so that ads don’t show up in content the advertiser doesn’t want to be affiliated with.
Unfortunately, vCE’s more advanced functions, like viewability and brand-safe filters, aren’t yet available for online video—they only work on display ads. But the technology is rapidly evolving, Bernie said, and video will be coming soon.
One major difference between Nielsen’s OCR and comScore’s vCE is that vCE is available in 28 countries, whereas OCR is available in just six, after launching in 4 new countries (including Canada) this spring. That makes comScore more attractive to large multinational agencies who want to directly compare campaigns across the markets they operate in.
On the other hand, the amount of data provided by Nielsen’s partnership with Facebook makes OCR much more reliable for small, targeted campaigns. “Nielsen campaign ratings is able to measure campaigns of pretty much any size, including those that are very small,” Wong said. “In Canada where campaigns tend to be smaller and focused in scope, the ability to measure campaigns of any size is very important.”
In addition, Nielsen has an overnight data delivery guarantee, whereas comScore’s delivery currently takes two or three days—which can make all the difference in a tightly focused campaign.
Perhaps the biggest problem for both products is that neither can measure ads viewed on YouTube.
Google is promoting its own measurement platforms for YouTube campaigns, Active View and Active GRP, and has denied Nielsen and comScore access to critical YouTube viewership data. It’s a major barrier to measuring the overall performance of any digital campaign.
