There may be several competing digital media measurement standards already out in the marketplace, but Jane Clarke thinks they don’t capture the full picture, so she wants to plug the gap.
Clarke has led the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) since it was formed in 2009 by television content providers, media agencies and advertisers to explore ways to measure audiences in the United States.
CIMM explores and identifies new methodologies and approaches to audience measurement through proof-of-concept pilot studies with independent measurement companies.
And the emerging, fragmented new TV ecosystem is causing CIMM to be pretty busy.
“There’s all forms of new TV exposure data that’s coming into the market and it’s a little bit of a wild west right now,” Clarke tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “If you’re a running an attribution study now for the same campaign across four different or five different providers, you’ll get wildly different results.”
Fragmentation continues to be the bugbear of the industry, the flip-side consequence of the explosion in plurality of viewing devices and viewing choices now on offer to consumers.
After the initial movement in which TV broadcasters went online, the subscription video (SVOD) wave has boomed whilst 2019 sees new attention on advertiser-supported OTT services.
That adds up to many sources of data which can be used to measure viewing – including from set-top boxes, automated content recognition and direct from device manufacturers. The trouble is, there is insufficient holistic data, Clarke says.
“The problem for the content providers is, they’re putting their content out in all these places, but they really can’t see a unified picture of how their content and their competitors’ content is doing on all these platforms,” she tells Beet.TV.
“We actually just completed doing an SVOD content measurement comparison across all the different providers out there. Because the problem is that some of them measure on the television, some measure on mobile devices and TV and computers.
“But there right now is not one provider that can measure original new content on SVOD platforms’ library content across television, mobile and computers.”
Why not just leave it to Nielsen and comScore, which also have significant efforts underway to extend their traditional panel-based TV measurement services?
Because “CIMM’s all about competition and innovation”, Clarke says, adding that a monopoly or duopoly in the media measurement space would not be good for the market.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.