Who’s Watching? How CTV Publishers Measure Viewership for Buyers
How do CTV publishers deliver credible and actionable performance metrics to the buy-side brands that support them? Estrella MediaCo’s Christina Chung, Vevo’s Julie Triolo, and TVREV’s Alan Wolk discuss the current challenges publishers face in measuring and communicating CTV performance to buyers in a clear and common language and the growing role of metadata in delivering usable metrics in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2024.
Person-based measurement vs. device-based measurement
Wolk says, “Nielsen was all about what they called person-based measurement. So you knew who was watching in the house because you filled out your little diary, and everybody had their diary. Whereas with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) and streaming measurement in general, we're measuring the TV set and less so the people in the household. But there are some companies that are working on that.” He asks Triolo of Vevo to talk about any exciting companies they are working with that measure beyond devices and delve deeper into who is specifically watching the programming.
Triolo says that Vevo has done a lot of work with TVision Insights, which measures not only who is in the room but whose eyes are actually looking at the screen.
“74% of our content is actually viewed with two or more people,” Triolo says. “The study that we did over the course of time really revealed some amazing metrics. We need a common lexicon for measurement in general.” She says that while it is good to have so many different forms of measurement to track the many different ways people view content, “We don't want to go back to a measurement monopoly. However, having those different platforms and data sources coming together to really establish best practices and [develop] a common language so that we can have that standardization in the market is going to be really important for our advertisers and for the customer experience as well.”
The increasing shift towards programmatic buying and the need for better metadata
Wolk asks Chung of Estrella MediaCo about their experience as a publisher in terms of measuring people versus devices.
“My particular world in Estrella is digital, and so there's a lot of different metrics we get there,” Chung says. “For us, our most important elements are impressions, revenue, and viewership, and within viewership, it's things like minutes, sessions, and uniques. Those are the key and core metrics that we do across all of our distribution platforms and all of our different layers of touchpoints with the consumer.”
Chung also discusses the increasing shift towards programmatic buying and the need for better metadata to facilitate this. “We all have to be much more diligent about the metadata that's getting passed to the buyers and making sure these buyers understand it. For example, we’re a Spanish-speaking company. When we first started out, we had all of our genres in Spanish, but the buy side buys in English. That's just one very easy example of how there's a disconnect between the buy side and the sell side. But I do think money is where things are going to go. Money has always been the driver of most things. So if we want to have some standardization, I feel that it's the buy side that will really start to build out something to make it more standardized.”
Wolk remarks that accurate metadata has been an issue in TV for a long time. “When they digitized all the shows, they didn't really put any metadata on them,” he says. “It was just Seinfeld – comedy, Friends - season three, episode two, and that was that.” He says to Chung, “So you're finding that you now have more metadata for both the ads and also for the content?”
Chung says, “We built out our content management system to make sure we pass through essential content signals, to make sure that our buy-side, at the end of the day, gets those different content signals. It could be things like genre, rating, or language. And these are things that never got passed on previously. And so programmatic buyers are starting to realize, ‘I only want these certain genres or these certain ratings.’ And so that way if we are able to pass it from the source input, hopefully these guys who are on the buy side will be able to buy our inventory more optimally than previously.”
The issues of “cherry-picking” content selection
Chung also mentions that “cherry picking” of content ID selection is an issue. “We [cover] the Democratic National Convention (DNC), for example, and that's great. We need to make sure that with some of these live events, we capture that excess demand. But then also, we don't want them to necessarily cherry-pick everything because we also have great content across our platforms. We don't want them to miss out on reaching some of these audiences.”
Join us in November 2024 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect.
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