SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — After years of trying, the TV industry’s long quest to embrace alternative measurement and currency methods has blossomed.
Now it’s time to roll out the tech for the next upfront TV ad sales season.
But Paramount doesn’t just want to use the new vendors to quantify cross-platform ad views – it also wants to start using the tools to measure g the popularity of its own content.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Colleen Fahey Rush, EVP, Chief Research Officer, Paramount, describes the company’s approach to the new wave.
Skin in the game
In response to Nielsen’s linear accreditation challenges and the demand to extend measurement across platforms, many broadcast companies have been testing out and adopting alternative providers, like iSpot.tv and VideoAmp.
“I’m very excited about how the next upfront is going to go,” says Fahey Rush. “I think that we’re going to see a huge increase in the amount of campaigns that are bought on alternative currencies.”
That excitement is driven by Paramount’s need. Fahey Rush says the company has “a lot of skin in the measurement game because of how diverse our portfolio is”, encompassing CBS, Nickelodeon, Paramount+, Pluto and more.
“I’ve been around long enough to see a lot of failed attempts at bringing innovation and competition to the measurement space,” she says.
“This time feels really different and I’m really optimistic, because there are more vendors, vendors participating and the whole ecosystem is participating. This feels like, for the first time, we really all are.”
Beyond measurement
Paramount’s SVP advanced advertising Travis Scoles has previously told Beet.TV why it’s important to understand which of them support currency and which enable measurement.
But Fahey Rush doesn’t want to stoop at either.
“As soon as we get past the upfront, we’re hopefully going to open the aperture and really work with these vendors around not just campaign measurement but content measurement, because that’s a really important part of the equation,” she says.
“The researchers at all of these publishers work with not just ad sales, but marketing and scheduling and on-air promo optimization and conversion from linear to streaming, etc.
“Having great measurement data is necessary for all of those other stakeholders. And we want the newer vendors to really start turning their attention to developing their data to be useful for those kinds of use cases.”
Measurement challenge
Nielsen has faced challenged over the last year, after its accreditation for national TV measurement was suspended by the Media Rating Council (MRC) for under-counting audiences early during the pandemic.
Paramount’s Fahey-Rush says: “Measurement has been very challenged for a long time. It’s relied on a panel that’s too small for the amount of fragmentation and viewing endpoints that there are today.
“When COVID came along, it really shined a spotlight on just how fragile the panel methodology alone is. Frankly, it’s introduced a lot of risk into our ability to forecast and deliver on the campaigns that we’re trafficking through our portfolio. That, full stop, has to end.”
The MRC has said Nielsen “has made significant progress on most of the issues” with possible reinstatement coming soon, and Nielsen has also plowed ahead with its next-generation media measurement system, accounting for more than just traditional TV.
You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.