The Advanced Advertising Summit panel Measuring Results looked at the latest ways to measure campaign performance, from counting impressions to determining return on investment. 

Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau, moderated. He asked the panelists to define advanced advertising. Leslie Wood, iSpot.tv chief research officer, described it as the tools that were built for digital that are increasingly factoring into TV buys. “Across the board, we are bringing the digital world into TV,” she said.  

Erica Barnes, A+E Networks senior director, audience innovation, spoke about advertiser aims varying from target age and gender, to something more specific like consumers who ride bicycles. “Our industry is evolving so much,” she said, “with brands at different stages of evolution.”

As the conversation progressed, Mohammed Chughtai, global head of advanced TV at MiQ, mentioned the quality of data decreasing, causing a trust issue with the user. “The lack of trust in digital will happen to the addressable TV space,” he said. “The same audience is being recycled.”

Barnes spoke about A+E offering business outcome guarantees to build trust with partners. “We want to move away from general reach impressions,” she said. 

She spoke about a women’s health brand planning to advertise on Lifetime, but A+E research saw that it would pop in a few shows on History. The brand went with the new plan, and Barnes spoke of “unbelievable numbers” for the campaign. 

Larry Allen, VP and general manager, data & addressable enablement, Comcast Advertising, said there can be pushback from advertisers set in the traditional ways of buying ads. There used to be one way to buy television, he said, and now there are multiple ways. It can be a lot to sort out. 

“Let the data tell you what is logical now,” he said. “Before, we didn’t have the data.”

Cunningham brought up whether AI will emerge as a major factor in the ad game. “Absolutely yes, AI is going to play a part,” said Allen. “But the human has to be the copilot. Or AI has to be the copilot to the human, depending on your perspective.”

Added Barnes, “There’s a lot of nuance that is required for it to be truly effective.”

What will people be talking about and adjusting to throughout the year? 

The new year is ushering in fresh opportunities and carryover challenges in the media landscape. Many are continued trends from the past couple of years around data privacy and measurement. Others are newer trends as viewership changes continue to shift and more emphasis is put on profitability for media companies. Here are some expectations we see on the near horizon: 

Measurement and Data Privacy Shifts: As rules and regulations around consumer data privacy continue to grow, advertisers will continue to explore alternatives to cookie-based and multi-touch attribution (MTA) solutions for targeting, measurement and attribution, including data clean rooms, media mix modeling and geographic-based media experimentation. Additional alternatives will include survey and zero-party data (data a user shares intentionally with a company). 

Media mix modeling is the highest in demand right now in terms of emerging alternatives followed by experimentation. Clean rooms and zero-party data are supplemental at this point. 

The media industry, unfortunately, remains no closer to establishing standards of measurement and attribution. As far as digital tracking, targeting and measurement, everyone is still very cookie-dependent and will remain so until forced to do something else. These solutions will be additive to the measurement and data-tracking arsenal. As long as cookies are viable, cookies will remain the preferred tracking, measurement and targeting option.

Media Consumption Continues to Shift to Influencer-Based Content: Media consumption continues to shift to growth and value in the creator economy. YouTube, TikTok, and Meta have given independent creators a platform to develop large and loyal audiences that brands can connect with. TikTok, especially, will grow exponentially compared to the other “legacy” digital platforms, according to findings in the EMarketer Influencer Marketing 2022 report.

Media Consolidation Among Streaming Platforms: Some companies lack the scale to compete in streaming (AMC, Paramount, etc.,) as the new streaming bundles from the likes of The Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery begin to look a lot more like siloed cable-TV bundles. But pressure is on the big players as well with an increased focus on profitability. A swift change in leadership atop Disney at the end of last year put share price in the spotlight as well as weaknesses in Disney’s various businesses — such as streaming platform Disney Plus likely not becoming profitable until 2024.  Given the challenges in continued growth and pressure on profitability, streamers will look for ways to cut costs or find new areas for growth, which could include further consolidation (buying other streaming services) and bundling.

Sports Rights Deals: A lot will happen in terms of sports rights deals in 2023 as more value is put on individual league deals, exclusive deals like “NFL Sunday Ticket” and the future of the regional sports networks given their current ties to limited cable TV bundles. Players like Apple, Google and Amazon have the ability to use their cash to make large jumps in the streaming space very quickly by purchasing streaming sports rights deals, as Google just did with NFL Sunday Ticket for YouTube. There is also talk of the sports leagues themselves (Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League in particular) buying back some of the sports rights deals to distribute through their own streaming services. 

Audience Measurement with Alternative Currencies: Now approaching the one-year mark in which many agencies and advertisers began dipping a toe in the water of alternative currencies to Nielsen (iSpot TV, VideoAmp, and Comscore primarily), it remains to be seen how advertisers will react to the multiple tools available for measurement of cross-screen TV and video campaigns. The most likely scenario is that each network group will begin to provide preferred deals to advertisers, as we have already seen with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery,  while Nielsen continues to remain the most preferred currency across partners.

Social Trends with a Focus on AI and Privacy: Twitter continues to shed advertisers and users as it struggles with brand safety, content moderation, and executive departures following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform. TikTok continues to increase its share of video time spent, providing consumers with an effective quick hit of entertainment dopamine. Meanwhile, a bill to ban the platform is gaining steam in Congress. 

Will TikTok eat our brains in 2023? Is the metaverse a bucket of hogwash? Those questions will fade into the background as more people adopt the next generation of social media with ChatGPT and the real question will become, what do the new advancements in AI mean for how machines will play a role in our daily lives? ▪️

Throughout 2022, alternative TV-measurement solutions and currencies dominated headlines, presentations and panels — with most sellers predicting, even advocating, replacing Nielsen as TV’s data foundation. While sellers believe it’s time to overhaul TV measurement, buyers are less bullish for outright change  — especially given Nielsen’s recent partnerships with major digital players such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Roku.

When we talked to 200 advertisers this summer, they overwhelmingly said Nielsen will remain their primary currency for TV buys through the foreseeable future. While they agree panel data is outdated, only 46% support completely replacing Nielsen.

The reason: A fragmented measurement landscape makes a buyer’s job much harder. Of course, they want more accurate views of audiences. They simply don’t have the resources to select, test and ultimately manage multiple providers. Nor can they efficiently reconcile differences in audience counts when sellers use different currencies. 

That said, advertisers do see the value in using alternative currencies alongside Nielsen. And they believe alternative currencies will ultimately improve the TV advertising marketplace. So far, two in five advertisers that use alternatives to Nielsen find them just as effective as Nielsen, while one-third find them more effective than Nielsen. 

On average, advertisers now work with two providers and are willing to bring in a third. Among the uninitiated, more than half are open to discussion but haven’t made any inquiries.

Sellers need alternative measurement to get full value for audience delivery. With Nielsen strengthening its hold on planning, they need to advance a hybrid future. So, how do sellers get buyers to do what’s best for the business?

Define currency. Advertisers tell us they don’t fully understand the difference between alternative currency and measurement. A universal definition will help. Our survey defined currency as an agreed-upon metric, offering a guarantee that the media buyer and seller agree to use as the basis for transacting TV ad buys. 

Explain the emerging alternatives. Only 29% of advertisers consider themselves very familiar with alternative measurement approaches. Networks and providers need to explain the advantages of alternatives for specific advertisers and situations, starting with their largest accounts, which our research shows are most open to experimenting.

Demystify the methodologies. Advertisers are equally concerned with methodology and performance, and they need consistency of reporting based on robust data sets. Take the time to explain unique benefits in depth. And since every approach has blind spots, spell them out.

Provide the necessary scaffolding. Reassure buyers that alternative currencies can be used in a portion of buys and/or in parallel with Nielsen. Of the advertisers that have used an alternate measurement provider this year, most are testing and benchmarking against Nielsen. So, present exploratory opportunities that mitigate risk, and let advertisers evolve at their own pace.

Create an industry short list. Beyond individual sellers’ educational efforts, a short list of approved providers across the industry may move advertisers confidently en masse into alternate measurement and currency.

Advertisers are voting for a multi-currency world with Nielsen as the foundation. Their question isn’t whether alternate measurement and currencies can improve TV buying. It’s whether networks collectively can make buyers comfortable with a new way of doing business. ▪️

Nielsen, which has been touting that Nielsen One, its new cross-platform measurement system, is on track, quietly informed clients last week that the “big data” on which the platform relies isn’t ready to be used to make transactions.

Nielsen had planned to include its big data — information on viewing from set-top boxes and smart TVs — in its national TV ratings in September and have clients use it as currency in the scatter advertising market.

“Nielsen has been working with the industry to share the details of our methodology and the associated impact to audience estimates,” Nielsen said in its note to clients last Wednesday.  “One consistent piece of feedback from both clients and the MRC has been the need to explore additional methods to further reduce variability and improve overall stability. Similarly, we anticipate the need for additional enhancements to further address the limitations of big data. We have continued to iterate on potential enhancements to address these needs and are actively researching additional techniques in this area.

“Given the potential trend break that enhancements may cause, and in consideration of feedback that clients largely will not be transacting on this data in September, the upcoming launch of big data will no longer be for transaction purposes. This will allow more time to test, validate and share the impact of any additional changes, as well as consider MRC audit results, prior to the full transition in September 2023,” Nielsen said.

Asked about the delay and whether it would have an impact on Nielsen One, Nielsen responded with a statement.

"As planned, Nielsen will be launching the inclusion of Big Data sources into National TV reporting as of the September 2022 measurement,“ the statement said. “As we work to ensure the best quality and stability of the data during this transition, we have made the decision to delay using this data for transaction purposes. This decision does not impact our plans for full transition to panel, plus big data, in September 2023, or our path to accreditation for our National TV measurement service.”

With more viewers cutting the cord and streaming, Nielsen’s traditional panel methodology is having trouble keeping up with fragmenting consumer behavior. The panels also broke down during the pandemic, resulting in Nielsen undercounting viewers and its national rating service losing its accreditation from the Media Rating Council, the industry’s watchdog. 

A meeting to review an audit of Nielsen's big data methodology, scheduled for August 25, was postponed. 

“Because Nielsen is working on enhancements to its big data initiative, we postponed certain of the audit processes and a previously scheduled review meeting on this initiative in order to extend our audit to cover these enhancements,” MRC senior VP, associate director David Gunzerath said. “The committee hasn’t seen any audit results yet and has not met, and the MRC staff believes these enhancements are important to be included in our consideration.”

The MRC is also working with the MRC to get its national and local TV ratings systems reaccredited. The audit of Nielsen's big-data methodology is designed to verify its compliance with the MRC's standards so that if the national service gains back accreditation, the combined methodology would maintain accreditation.

With complaints about Nielsen rising, TV networks are aggressively working with measurement companies offering alternatives to Nielsen, which itself is trying to complete a $16 billion buyout to a group of private equity investors that believes Nielsen’s sagging stock price was too low.

When Nielsen first released big data numbers on an informational basis to clients earlier this year, TV networks represented by the VAB spotted discrepancies and urged Nielsen not to release further data until the problems could be solved and more information about Nielsen’s methodology could be disclosed.

“This is a big deal,” VAB CEO Sean Cunningham said of Nielsen delaying the use of its big data for transactions. “It’s an indication of a state of complete unreadiness.”

Since March, when VAB went public with its problems with Nielsen’s big data numbers, Nielsen has continued to issue ratings including big data on a monthly basis for the industry to review and the quality of those ratings has not improved, Cunningham said.

“It never got one iota better,“ he said. “What we saw was a compounding of the same types of illogical errors. At the same time, Nielsen has not been forthcoming about its methodology or what steps it was taking to halt the errors. Their current C3 and C7 national ratings panel is also a black box of dysfunctional mystery.”

Cunningham added that if the big data isn’t ready for prime time, it’s also unlikely that Nielsen One can be rolled out this year, which continues to be Nielsen’s plan.

“We were told everything was going to be on time, the data was going to be just fine, it was going to be considered for trading as currency data and it would be audited and it would be accredited,“ Cunningham said. “They went 0 for 4 on all of that." The new delay, which appears to acknowledge problems with big data, could be seen as good news for the advertising and marketing community, which still uses Nielsen as its main viewership measurement standard.

“Anyone who's in the business of building a brand or building positive sales momentum as a marketer is not going to be served by exponentially defective currency,“ he added. “So, yeah, it's the fact that they've had to acknowledge this need to go fix this is definitely good news for a marketer, in that they're not going to be subject to substandard measurement and currency.” 

That news also comes as the FCC could be reconsidering its exclusive reliance on Nielsen data to define TV station markets for determining must-carry/retransmission consent carriage elections and other purposes.

The FCC voted unanimously last month to tentatively adopt Nielsen's Local TV Report as the successor to the company's phased out TV Station Index. But one commissioner, Republican Nathan Simington, used that vote to suggest the FCC's reliance on Nielsen data may be an overreliance on a single source that needed examining and perhaps rethinking. He cited the MRC accreditation issues as one of the reasons why. Contributing: John Eggerton. ■

Success in TV advertising has always been built on quality and premium experiences. The complexity of the rapidly digitizing marketplace might have drowned out certain quality-centric conversations in recent years, but it never changed that fundamental ground truth. Now those conversations are more important than ever. 

After years of divergence and fragmentation in the TV space — across streaming, over-the-top, connected TV, you name it — we’ve reached an important inflection point as it relates to the kinds of conversations happening on the media-buying front. While TV buys remain multifaceted and nuanced, many of the familiar dichotomies within the space — between linear and digital, between branding and addressability — are falling away. In their place, we’re seeing conversations converge around one factor: quality.

It's a welcome shift within the industry, one that’s long in coming and essential to the continued advancement of the TV space. Let’s take a deeper look at how we got here and why quality and premium experiences will lead us where we need to go now. 

 A Shift in Tone and Focus

When it comes to buying eyeballs, there are a lot of ways for advertisers to get tonnage these days, and on the cheap. But what’s become particularly apparent in the TV space is that not all impressions are created equal. As the TV and video landscape has fragmented, so has the value associated with reaching viewers across the many varied platforms, channels and devices on which they consume content. 

Simply put: People participating in a premium TV experience tend to be more engaged and vested in their programming than those who are giving fleeting attention to the latest cat video. Advertisers understand this, and they are increasingly looking to ensure their media spends prioritize the former over the latter. 

More specifically, what we’re seeing more these days is a number of savvy advertisers looking for extensions of their standard TV buys into streaming and OTT inventory — but not just any streaming or OTT inventory. They want to ensure their linear extensions are geared toward network inventory where the value and experience are just as premium as they’ve come to expect from their linear placements. They want exclusive, quality inventory, and they want white-glove service. But at the same time, they want to create a cross-platform experience and to wrap sophisticated conversion data and analytics around it. 

The conversations surrounding these cross-platform buys are a far cry from the volume-based transactions happening in the programmatic TV space today. And that’s because control of fragmented TV budgets is yet again shifting. 

Talking to Empowered TV Buyers 

When streaming and OTT advertising opportunities came into being, the media-buying landscape split. For years, linear and streaming advertising were handled by separate teams, the latter of which tended to fall in the camp of the digital buying teams. Now, a lot of that is changing. Traditional TV buyers are now increasingly bringing linear extensions under their purview, and they’re being empowered to extend their relentless insistence on quality inventory and premium experiences into new areas. 

This shift makes sense. After all, if content is appearing on that big screen in the living room, does it really matter which kind of pipes it is flowing through? Also, by bringing these buys together under the same buyer’s purview, we’re seeing a much more unified approach to measurement when it comes to campaign impact. 

Part of the reason TV inventory fragmented across buying teams in the first place was because of the vastly different measurement mechanisms that emerged in the early days of streaming and OTT. The new inventory was digital, with a digital language surrounding it, and so it made sense that responsibility for these buys slid toward the teams most familiar with the language. But here again, we’re seeing a shift.

As the TV industry pivots toward a more unifying language inclusive of impressions — versus less extensible concepts like gross ratings points (GRPs) — TV buyers are becoming sophisticated in their understanding of audience addressability and how best to target both their linear and streaming spending for maximum effect. They’re asking more nuanced questions than ever, and it’s paying off when it comes to a renewed emphasis on quality and premium experiences.

Today’s empowered TV buyers are leveraging their deep expertise from decades of linear buys and up-leveling their results through the transparency, measurability and added reach of streaming and OTT — and it’s really just the beginning. As the systems and partnerships that support the vast TV landscape continue to unify and connect more dots on the back end, advertisers will continue to extend the power of their creative and messaging across new audiences and platforms alike.

In this reimagined TV landscape, quality and premium experiences will reign supreme. Just as they always have. ▪️

Beyond Will Smith's infamous pimp-slap of Chris Rock, the other big news in Hollywood has been the free-for-all assault on Nielsen by networks and advertisers. 

In the otherwise staid and arcane world of audience measurement, the campaign to replace the Nielsen system with different methodologies has garnered unprecedented press and grown to undeniable proportions. So much so that Nielsen, itself, recently agreed to a $16 billion acquisition by a group of private equity investors who are betting big on the company and the media measurement space.

Last summer, Sean Cunningham, the combative chief of the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), fired a shot heard around the media world, charging Nielsen with under-counting television viewers during the pandemic. Cunningham tapped a deep reservoir of ill-will against Nielsen, long in the making. In so doing, he gained industry support to oust the company from its perch atop the audience measurement sector. Nielsen’s decades-long dominance in media ratings, its expensive client fees and its legacy of tin-eared leaders had reached a tipping point.

At a time when more and more people watch video content through streaming, measuring linear TV viewing has become all-important for legacy television. Numbers matter when it comes to audiences, and it is a simple formula. More numbers, more money. Anything upsetting this precarious balance is anathema, including reports of a growing shift from linear to streaming.

David Kenny, Nielsen’s intrepid CEO, admitted that it should have pivoted more quickly to account for this shift, COVID notwithstanding. He hastened to note that the long-awaited Nielsen One measurement technology would be rolled out ahead of schedule, providing a comprehensive new methodology across all platforms.

But the VAB has been no fan of the Nielsen model or its leader. As the industry foil for influential networks and media companies, VAB has eschewed recent data revealing a downturn in linear viewing and a decline in ratings and revenue for its members.

Nielsen’s offer to take a voluntary hiatus from Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation was too little too late. The contentious charges from the VAB compelled the MRC to suspend Nielsen's accreditation for national TV measurement. A status it suffers today.

As the most powerful television group few have ever heard of, the MRC is solely responsible for certifying and accrediting the companies and methodologies that measure television viewing audiences. Its good housekeeping seal of approval decides the fate and fortunes of those doing the measuring. As such, it has great impact upon the economics of the media ecosystem, including networks, broadcasters, advertisers, and agencies. The MRC decision to disaccredit Nielsen in September opened the floodgates to a new competitive regime and unleashed the pent-up scorn for the company.

In October, Kelly Abcarian, EVP of Ad Measurement at NBCU, joined the fray and upped the ante. An erstwhile Nielsen exec and corporate loyalist, with years of advertising bona fides, Abcarian left Nielsen after the company split into two last year. She now leads the charge to bring down her old company under a new banner.

But she does not battle alone.

Abcarian has conscripted Nielsen's competitors and formed an alliance of nattering nabobs of negativism, otherwise known as NBCU’s Measurement Innovation Forum. For all the talk about new ways to measure media and audiences, the participating firms have made little progress, according to the MRC.

Just last month, the MRC reported that only two such companies are actively involved in its accreditation process for the measurement of linear and connected TV: ComScore and Nielsen. Both are coordinating with the MRC and accreditation appears certain but not in time for the all-important “Upfronts”-- one of the most significant exchanges of dollars in the media marketplace.

According to the NBCU Look Book, many of the other measurement firms — however loosely defined — are either unaccredited or not engaged in the process at all. Several of them (605; Oracle; Samba TV; VideoAmp) have yet to submit their plans to the MRC and others have no plans to seek MRC accreditation at all. iSpot TV and TVSquared seem to be the exceptions. While several may have capital, nary a one has the depth of competence, technological capability, or market confidence evidenced by the incumbent. So much for robust competition.

Networks have the best of both worlds in the brawl for ratings dominance. On the one hand, they get the latest thinking on measurement technology from contenders and pretenders alike. One network for example, has promoted a scheme to measure itself – akin to grading your own homework after a take-home test. On the other hand, they get to leverage the industry instability into favorable contract terms with Nielsen (and the newcomers). This is sure to work in their favor, as chaos often breeds economic advantage.

But the question of balancing big data analytics with qualitative audience metrics remains daunting. That challenge looms large for all the contenders to the Nielsen throne. Absent panels, or some other source of qualitative data, measurement flaws will abound. Big data has been shown to be discriminatory in both economic and racial terms.

While Nielsen's head is bloodied, it is unbowed even if uncrowned by the MRC. But to be the champ, you have to beat the champ and, thus far, that has not happened. At last look, it remains the measurement currency of the realm booking both linear and streaming clients in strong numbers. The shakeup in media measurement has led to favorable, although flawed, results.

Other than Nielsen, not one of the new contenders for ratings primacy has seen fit to focus on minority viewers -- a demographic that over-indexes on video consumption across all platforms. For the past 12 years, Nielsen has charted and chronicled the importance of African-American, Hispanic and Asian viewers for brands, advertisers, networks, broadcasters and agencies. Each year, it has heralded these viewers as quintessential media and advertising consumers. None of the other contenders for the throne have paid attention to this important American sector, which accounts for nearly 40% of viewers.

Until the other media measurement firms address these deficiencies with clarity, integrity, and responsibility, they will never be quite ready for prime time.

Editor's note: This story was updated on April 14 to change a reference to Kelly Abcarian's departure from Nielsen. 

© 2022 Adonis E. Hoffman ■

Nielsen said it has launched a Diverse Media Equity Program, which is designed to highlight minority-owned media companies to advertisers and media buyers.

Canela Media, a Latina-owned media company, was part of a pilot initiative and the number of campaigns it had that were measured by Nielsen tripled.

Also: Estrella Media Renews Local TV Measurement Deal with Nielsen

“We’re excited about Nielsen's commitment to bringing more visibility and support to minority-owned businesses,“ said Isabel Rafferty, founder and CEO of Canela Media. “Our partnership with Nielsen has enabled us to deliver the granular level of transparency and measurement our clients demand. Nielsen has been a tremendous partner; they understand our business and offer us valuable insight for campaign optimization and advertising efficacy.”

Nielsen, along with Procter & Gamble, has seeded a $130,000 reimbursement program with the National Minority Supplier Development Council to help cover certification fees for diverse-owned media suppliers who qualify. Certification is frequently required by large companies to qualify for diverse investment.

“Nielsen is investing in diverse-owned media by getting rid of historical barriers in traditional measurement,“ Nielsen CEO David Kenny said. ”Advertisers and the media industry recognize the need to be more inclusive and want to ensure they reach an audience that is increasingly diverse. We are leading the charge to develop a consistent framework and metrics to help demonstrate the value of diverse-owned media.”

As part of the new initiative, Nielsen releases the Diverse-Owned Media Audience Reach and Profiles report. The report found that:

Hispanic-owned local TV reaches 61% of viewers 18-plus in markets ranked 101 and smaller where they are present including 24% of Asian Americans, 33% of Blacks and 39% of Hispanic viewers,

Asian American-owned local TV stations, where they are present in markets 1 to 48,  reach more than 200,000 adults 18-plus.

Native American-owned radio reaches nearly 800,000 listeners across the U.S. with listeners spending almost seven hours a week on average in metro markets ranked 51-100. ■

Wendy McMahon, president and co-head of ViacomCBS’s CBS News and Stations unit, has sent a letter to Nielsen objecting to the audience measurement firm’s plan to include broadband-only homes in its local ratings.

The complaint adds to a chorus of criticism for Nielsen, which is already under fire for undercounting viewers and under pressure from an industry that is accelerating the search for alternatives to Nielsen, which has long dominated the ratings business.

Also: In New Error, Nielsen Admits It Left Out Some Out-Of-Home Viewing

As more consumers turn to streaming, Nielsen has been forced to make adjustments in the ways it measures viewing. One change is to include homes that have broadband internet service only, instead of TV households.

Local stations worry the system will lead to lower ratings for pay TV and over-the-air broadcasts.

“ViacomCBS strongly objects to the integration of All Broadband Only homes into the Nielsen Local Panels as of January 2022,” McMahon letter says.

Nielsen has acknowledged undercounting local ratings during the past year, McMahon noted, adding that those problems have not yet been rectified. On top of that would come the broadband-only issue.

“Despite long-standing industry and MRC requests, Nielsen does not have defined Universe Estimates for these [broadband-only] homes. According to CBS’s analysis of first- and third-party research, Nielsen is overstating/over-representing BBO penetration,” McMahon said.  

“Nielsen’s previous requirements for a home to qualify as a BBO home in local were arbitrary and capricious. Nielsen now wants to remove the local viewing qualifiers altogether, impacting local broadcasters even more negatively,” she said.

McMahon said Nielsen has provided ViacomCBS with only a month’s worth of data to review. She said that was insufficient for generating estimates and projections that its stations can use to sell ads.

McMahon also said the Media Rating Council had cited “serious deficiencies” with Nielsen’s plans at a recent audit meeting.

The MRC found that meters weren’t where they were supposed to be and that they were only 71% accurate. 

“There is nothing that we have seen so far that gives us confidence that Nielsen is ready to include BBO Homes into the local marketplace,” McMahon said. “The financial impact to our stations, based on the only impact data available to us, will be significant. We continue to request that Nielsen restore its local panels to acceptable quality levels prior to making major changes, such as the inclusion of all BBO homes.” ■

Comscore said it has begun measuring viewing across YouTube and YouTube TV across YouTube’s biggest platforms, including personal computers, mobile devices and connected TV.

Comscore will be able to provide metrics for de-duplicated viewing of campaigns on YouTube and YouTube TV for advertisers and measure the co-viewing of content on CTV screens.

The move comes as Comscore and others jockey to provide networks and advertisers with measurement alternatives to Nielsen.

Adding YouTube and YouTube TV to Comscore Campaign Ratings is a big step for measuring CTV campaigns at a time when advertisers are jumping into CTV to reach cord-cutting consumers. Comscore estimates that 80% of CTV reach in the U.S. falls on five streaming services — and only two, YouTube and Hulu, are ad-supported. 

Also Read: NBCUniversal, YouTube TV Reach New Deal, Avert Blackout

“Consumer viewing of collective video advertising across linear TV and CTV continues to grow, and as part of that trend, YouTube and YouTubeTV now represent one of the largest national and global sources of ad supported content,” said Elizabeth Daly, VP group media director, video investment at media agency Mediahub Worldwide, part of Interpublic Group. “As the industry navigates unprecedented scrutiny of measurement accuracy and stability, it’s critical to have reliable deduplicated cross-platform measurement. We believe this partnership will help give advertisers much-needed clarity and a more complete view of their overall advertising effectiveness.”

The relationship between Comscore and YouTube was originally announced in August. It has taken until now to implement, but Comscore claims to be the first to accomplish it.

Nielsen announced that it would also provide similar metrics for YouTube in October 2020, but Nielsen has not yet said its service is up and running.

“The industry has been clamoring for deduplicated cross-platform measurement. I am excited that we are the first to include Google’s YouTube and YouTubeTV inventory in our CCR solution,” Comscore CEO Bill Livek said. “With this expansion of our partnership, Comscore has the most complete view of one of the largest national and global sources of ad supported content. This addition is a game-changer, as it greatly improves brands’ and agencies’ ability to plan and measure deduplicated reach and frequency of their campaigns.”

The TV industry is trying to figure out how it will do business in a world where Nielsen is no longer the dominant measurement company.

On Sept. 1, the Media Rating Council stripped its seal of approval from Nielsen’s national TV measurement product, long the industry’s gold standard. The MRC’s historic move capped a year in which revelations about Nielsen brought decades of complaints about the ratings leader to a head and created fresh opportunities for a legion of rivals.

“The only thing we know for sure is how dissatisfied a lot of the networks are and how serious they are about advancing measurement,” said Sean Muller, CEO of iSpot.TV, one of the companies hoping to move into any void created by Nielsen’s issues. 

The revelation that Nielsen undercounted viewers during the pandemic, potentially costing TV networks hundreds of millions of dollars — a charge made public by the industry trade group VAB and confirmed by the MRC — brought a new focus to the constant criticism Nielsen has historically received as the industry’s umpire.

A More Complex Picture

“The reality is that data has never been more important to content companies, and the challenge of determining exactly who is watching what, when, across multiple platforms has never been more complex,” AMC Networks president of commercial revenue and partnerships Kim Kelleher said. “Any company working in this space needs to evolve and deliver accurate and comprehensive information to its customers and the entire competitive ecosystem that exists around content. That’s the price of admission today and going forward, bottom line.”

In a letter to clients sent after Nielsen'a accreditation was suspended, Nielsen CEO David Kenny said, “Rest assured, we will continue to provide the most representative, reliable and robust audience measurement available, which the market can continue to trade on with confidence.”

Kenny said Nielsen was working on fixing its panels, which became smaller and less reliable during the pandemic; strengthening its business continuity and recovery process; improving how it communicates changes in its methods; and changing the way it incorporates broadband-only homes in ratings.

To measure the industry in the future, Kenny said the company is working on Nielsen One, which aims to use the most advanced data science to reflect the new ways people are consuming media, ensure inclusion and representation, enable comparability across all platforms and de-duplicate audiences.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal has been the most public about trying to create alternatives to Nielsen, sending out requests for proposal to more than 50 measurement and data companies in a quest for an independent system with multiple vendors providing multiple metrics to replace the current “outdated” approach to counting viewers at a time when streaming is on the rise and pay TV subscription continue to erode. 

NBCU said that 80% of the companies it called on are participating, including Nielsen. Additional companies have asked to join the process. NBCU said it expects to wrap up its process by the week of Sept. 20.

Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav also has been a public critic of Nielsen, whose failure has cost media sellers money. Behind the scenes, Discovery is also seeking some form of redress from the measurement company, according to sources. Discovery is also preparing to use alternate sources for measurement as currency in negotiations with advertisers as soon as the fourth quarter, the sources said. Discovery officials declined to comment.

As angry as the industry has been with Nielsen in the past, efforts to supplant it have fizzled. This time around, the outcome might be different.

“I think if there’s a memory of 2021, I think it will be as the year when real change finally got set in motion on measurement and currency after decades of frustration,” VAB president and CEO Sean Cunningham said.

The suspension of Nielsen’s accreditation removes the blanket endorsement from the MRC and means instead of treating Nielsen metrics as an agreed-upon truth set, buyers and sellers will know the data is still extremely faulty. “It’s now a starting point. There’s a need to bring in other measurement data bases, benchmarks and currencies, which started in the upfront,” Cunningham said.

How would such a multiverse of measurement work?

If the buyer favors one set of metrics, and the seller likes another, “that becomes part of the art of the deal,” Cunningham said. “The marketer wins ultimately, because you’ve got increased competition for market share. That’s all the fuel for innovation and accelerating product development you could possibly ask for.” 

In the past, attempts to replace or supplement Nielsen have collapsed in part because clients weren’t thrilled about paying multiple ratings suppliers. 

Cunningham acknowledged buyers and sellers would incur extra costs with a multiverse of measurement options. “But I think those expenses are well incurred if we can assure marketers we’re getting closer to the truth and there’s some real accuracy in the things they’re looking to get business outcomes from.”

Rivals Ramp Up Efforts

While there are thousands of data and research companies, the ones most often mentioned as being able to supply the measurements the industry has been looking to Nielsen for are Comscore, iSpot.TV and VideoAmp.

Even as Nielsen was losing accreditation, rivals were stepping up to get the MRC’s checkmark. Comscore said it was working with the MRC to accelerate the start of the process that could lead to accreditation. iSpot’s Muller said his company is in the pre-assessment phase of the MRC’s accreditations process. 

“We’re an independent measurement company and I think some industry body should be there to ensure that measurement companies are doing what they say they’re doing,” Muller said. The MRC process is laborious, lengthy and costly. “Maybe some innovations are needed there as well,” he said.

VideoAmp said it is still evolving the methodology used to integrate data. “It’s in the industry’s interest. We’ll be there when we’re ready,” VideoAmp chief product officer Cameron Meierhoefer said.

Muller said success in the measurement business now is all about trust. “Trust in the current currency is on a very rapid decline at the moment,” he said. “You build trust by having really good products that are consistent, that are accurate, standing behind them and getting people to adopt them. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

iSpot.TV built a business by cataloging commercials and using smart TV data to measure how many people watched each one. It now also measures and benchmarks how well ads perform in terms of business impact. NBCU uses iSpot’s data to show that Olympic ads were having an impact. Discovery in May said it would use iSpot to give advertisers information about the impact of the commercial run across its linear and streaming properties in the United States.

Muller said the industry needs separate systems, one to measure advertising and evaluate its impact and value, another to assess the popularity of content to help decide which shows to produce and how to distribute and schedule them. That’s especially important in an environment where dynamic ad insertion means that different viewers might see different commercials even while watching the same show at the same time.

Ultimately, there will be several companies offering those measurements, but not too many. “Once [buyers and sellers] decide what they want to negotiate on, the best and most trusted in each of these scenarios will rise up,” Muller said. “Our core business is helping marketers assess the effectiveness of their creative and media. From an ad-first capability, both in terms of audience delivery and performance, we feel really strongly that the marketplace has already embraced us.”

Time for Experimentation 

VideoAmp also sees itself as being one of the two or three companies whose measurement will be used in the future as currency used in contracts between media buyers and sellers, according to Meierhoefer. 

VideoAmp integrates a variety of data sets to measure viewing and advertising outcomes for clients. “We see ourselves pushing into the more fundamental aspects of measurement in terms of how you value and trade specific inventory,” Meierhoefer said.

Meierhoefer said that VideoAmp’s approach to measurement yields more granular data at a lower cost than legacy measurement companies. He said the expense of maintaining a large-scale sample household panel isn’t necessary in a world where data is plentiful.

“It’s a software problem and the type of problem that we can solve,” he said. “I don’t have to be a $2 billion company in order to construct a system that has new capabilities to help our clients make money.”

Between now and the next ad-sales upfront, Meierhoefer said there will be a period of experimentation with clients running things in parallel to see what would happen if they used different metrics. “I don’t think you’re going to see a sort of control-alt-delete reboot scenario where suddenly the whole industry just moves,” he said.

“The environment is really fascinating right now,” Meierhoefen said. “The industry has grumbled about Nielsen forever. Clients are asking are there alternatives. This is fantastic for us. We feel we’re ready to meet the challenge.” 

With Nielsen under fire for undercounting viewers during the pandemic, Samba TV is launching its Real-time TV Viewership Dashboard, which lets advertisers see what channels and shows are being watched within seconds.

Samba TV is launching the dashboard in four of the largest media markets--the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Australia--just before the start of the Olympics.

“As a leading provider of real-time TV data at global scale, Samba is uniquely able to quantify just how powerful the Olympics audience will be for viewership and brand sponsorship, which remains the primary business model for the Olympics globally," said Samba TV co-founder and CEO Ashwin Navin. “Now more than ever, TV data is critical for the media industry desperate to understand the rapid changes in viewership behaviors pre-, mid-, and post-pandemic. In the spirit of using data to drive transparency in media and foster innovation in the viewing experience of TV, we are pleased to offer the industry this powerful tool at no cost to facilitate discussion and innovation.”

Samba TV’s automatic content recognition technology, integrated at the chipset level across 24 Smart TV brands globally, identifies content that appears on the TV screen including TV shows, commercials, movies, and video games. With a global addressable footprint of 46 million devices, the company said its data enables advertisers, TV networks, and publishers to discover their TV audiences, amplify their marketing message across screens, and quantify the impact of their advertising.

As part of its announcement, Samba TV provides endorsements from media buyers.

“Having been at the forefront of providing our clients the most innovative and scalable data, Samba TV’s Real-time TV Viewership Dashboard is an important resource for every global brand engaged in large-scale events like the Olympics,” said IPG Media Lab managing director Chad Stoller. “This interactive tool provides comprehensive and at-scale TV analysis, imperative to our industry where there have been historic challenges making decisions with real-time data.”

"In today’s more addressable, measurable media ecosystem, marketer needs have evolved – they want to buy TV advertising the way they transact digitally – more dynamic, more flexible, more informed by data, and importantly, optimized in real-time,” said Dentsu's Amplifi U.S. president Mike Law. "Audiences around the world will be tuning into the Olympics almost universally, and tools like Samba TV’s Real-time TV Viewership Dashboard can enable understanding that fuels in-campaign buying decisions like never before.”

Vevo, the music video network, named iSpot, the data and analytics company, as its measurement and attribution provider for connected TV audiences.

“Vevo can be bought like TV, and now, measured all the more like TV. However, unlike traditional TV, we provide brands with scaled access to younger, harder-to-reach audiences,” said Bryon Schafer, senior VP, research, Vevo. "Advertisers are increasingly coveting these audiences who are not linear cable subscribers and simply do not watch much ad supported TV – and running campaigns on Vevo fills that void."

Vevo will use iSpot’s tools to distinguish its views on CTV from other viewing sources to authenticate a campaign’s incremental reach. Impressions measured by iSpot also take into account co-viewing to more accurately reflect the size of Vevo’s viewership.

“With iSpot, we can further demonstrate Vevo’s value to advertisers and showcase that campaigns really reach new audiences on connected TV, and not simply with what has been measurable,” added Schafer. “We’ve found iSpot to be a compelling platform that can measure TV with the enhanced precision we need for our brand partners.” 

CTV has been mushrooming and Vevo has been diving in, expanding its over-the-top distribution. It added 10 new TV partners in 2020 and its CTV viewership grew by 58% in the U.S. and 30% globally.

“Vevo is the leading music video network across all platforms, reaching a billion daily views on average, making it an attractive destination for brands to leverage its cultural cachet,” said Stuart Schwatzapfel, senior VP, media partnerships, iSpot. "iSpot will play a key role in Vevo’s data-driven decision-making around its sales and monetization strategy for CTV, and we’re excited to deepen our relationship in the months and years ahead.”

Understanding the factors that drive audiences and create viewer engagement outside of the sample-based linear technology is the goal behind Resonance AI, which has created a platform that combines viewer performance data with advanced machine learning, determining what video content engages audiences. The Seattle-based tech firm, which was just selected as a TechCrunch Top Pick for Disrupt 2020, processes the audio and visual elements of video and determines why and which content truly resonates with audiences for any video.

Resonance AI (formerly Transform) provides actionable insights that help increase viewing, subscriptions and purchases, which Jill Josephson, director of media partnerships for the company, describes as a “new well of data that broadcasters and content creators can use to better understand their audience.”

“Artificial intelligence (AI) really should be a pillar of the company that is woven into many different aspects,” said Josephson. “Obviously, we are talking about content and the future of television here and the load can be lightened by using AI. Just as our brains would process what we are seeing, that is what our systems tease. All of the tags, or data points, we use can be stored and compiled and used to make decisions.”

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“You don’t need to have an advanced degree in data science to be able to understand our platform,” she added. “And the value, particularly in today’s world of cross-platforms, is immeasurable.”

Operating under the tagline, “artificial intelligence for the world’s most innovative creators and users of video,” Resonance AI aggregates specific threads of the performance data it stores, generating the special real-time insights for each client. Those targets, which include networks, studios, broadcasters, streamers, advertisers and social media, are given insights on how a series, ad, newscast, movie, trailer or any user-generated content, connects with the audience. 

“You can make faster decisions and do a multitude more work a human could never accomplish using AI,” she said. “And it needs to be leveraged as a tool in the media industry in order to expand and to be able to meet the needs of the new consumers.”

We spoke with Josephson about Resonance AI and the value the firm brings to the media landscape.

Josephson is slated to participate in the virtual Audience Measurement Summit panel “Television Gets ‘Smart’” Sept. 30 during Fall TV 2020.

Q: Originally Resonance AI was called Transform. Can you tell us why the name of the company was changed and what it signifies? 

Jill Josephson: We started a rebrand in first quarter this year. The company was originally called Transform and we’ve been around for about six years now. We are about transforming the media industry, so Transform served us well. But our AI platform has been called Resonance AI because we are all about understanding what parts of the content are resonating with audiences. After we got feedback from clients and advisors that this name would serve us better, we started rebranding pretty immediately. 

Q: Can you give us a snapshot of what exactly it is your job entails at Resonance AI?

J.J.: When I started with the company about three years ago, media was a piece of what we did. We were still working with B2B and B2C businesses helping them deploy AI. Then we noticed a shift and my background is media, as well as our co-founder, Randa Minkarah. We understand the space and our company kind of naturally gravitated to solely focusing on AI for media. All of our clients are media tech firms.

I work directly with clients, offering further insights about their audience. And I work with our data partners, like TiVo and Comscore, to be able to utilize their data. I look for synergies between either the tech and data companies and the media companies who need solutions. And everything we do, and we build, is solutions driven and serves a need in the marketplace. Basically, it is making sure we are creating products that will expand the industry through a better understanding of the end user.

Q: What are you looking forward to most out of this conversation at your panel? Where are you expecting the conversation to go, and what would you hope audiences will glean from it?

J.J.: When I first started there was a lot of explaining to do about AI because no one really understood what it was. But now people are more familiar with it and want to utilize in their businesses. With the endless well of content providers out there, the deeper you can dive into the insights of your audience the more prosperous you can be. 

As a tool where we can work with a variety of data sources, I always enjoy, and learn from what other people are doing and what their visions of the future is. The more conversations we can have the better it is for everyone.

Q: What has changed for your firm, and your job, in this era of COVID (if anything)?

J.J.: For us, since we basically work remotely to begin with, it has not been all that different. And many companies have now proven they can prosper out of the traditional workplace. My hope is that the “old world,” the last indications of the “Mad Men” working world, are kind are over after this.

Q: Where do you see the future of the business going through what you are doing?

J.J.: I think Netflix is a certainly good indicator of what is possible. And there are a lot of forward-minded companies in the industry who are working towards change, and the process of figuring out how content will be primarily consumed in the future.

Ideally, I want to see us work with the clients who embrace change and need solutions. As a company, we have to understand what the new viewership trends are now. We need to be able to predict what the new media consumers want to watch. And we have to help companies make those predictions. 

Bill Livek has been in the business of measuring consumer behavior for 40 years, beginning his career at a time when a typical TV station was home to three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), PBS and one to three independent stations. Today, of course, is the era of “Peak TV,” where over 500 scripted series this year are expected to compete for a piece of the audience through a growing multitude of outlets as streaming continues to make inroads.

Now, of course, is the era of COVID-19, and its aftermath, when the consumer particularly hungry for options has access to more programs – and outlets -- than ever before. While no one knows for sure what lies ahead, Livek predicts a landscape, and the way we measure it, to be vastly different from what we once knew.

Ahead of his opening keynote at the Audience Measurement Summit on Tuesday, Sept. 29, part of Future's virtual Fall TV 2020, We spoke to Bill Livek about how Comscore is preparing to tackle this unchartered time in the media world.

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Q.: What are you looking forward to most out of this conversation? Where are you expecting the conversation to go, and what would you hope audiences will glean from it? 

Bill Livek: TV will never be the same, nor will its currency as a result of COVID-19. But things, of course, have been evolving for a long period of time, and I think we have taken long-term trends and compressed them into a rather short of time. We are going to see the death of traditional TV ratings and the birth of impressions as we see in digital. 

Comscore has built its business in the impression currency across digital and TV; who those impressions are; what products the people in the households behind those impressions purchase; the kind of cars are they dream about buying and where they are in that cycle, for example…things like that. We are seeing a whole revaluing of the TV ecosystem, not to mention a vastly different airline model, video communications like Zoom in place of in-person gatherings, and so many other business models that are changing. So, we will have to take an innovative approach about lies ahead.

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Q.: How is TV/video audience measurement changing in this evolving landscape? 

B.L.: What we have today, in this type of fractionalization, are samples that are only producing a response rate in the single digits. So, you are basically guessing what the 90 percent of people that you can’t measure are watching. Some people are trying to find the patchwork solutions, like measuring a number of different methods. We’ve approached this problem by measuring every minute in every impression that you can within the census. Every connected home that you have, via cable, satellite or Telco company, or a smart TV set to augment needs to be addressed. Every impression counts. 

Q.: What are the key takeaways from tackling coronavirus these last six months?

B.L.: With COVID, we’ve learned that people are watching and binge-watching a great deal of non-ad-supported TV; Netflix or Amazon or any of the streaming services. One of the great needs is to show an advertiser, and to show the media companies – TV stations and TV networks – that households who watch most of their viewing on non-ad-supported platforms might also watch ad-supported content. You need to have a system that addresses what the ad-supported programs are and how to reach them. That inventory becomes exponentially more valuable when you know the purchasing patterns of the people watching. 

This is certainly not a new concept after COVID, but it magnifies the importance of understanding the audience and how to best reach them with an ad impression. As people resume more outdoor activity, we will see less available minutes of the increased consumption.

I do think some of this change is permanent and believe that consumers will be watching their dollars more carefully. Every time we have an economic disruption, the consumers put their hands in their pockets on certain items and I think they are going to do that on TV as well. Spending an accelerated amount of money on all these different streaming services is not something everyone is going to do. I think we will see the value of the cable bundle, and I believe the ad platform will become more important.

Q.: What are the key initiatives at Comscore. Has it changed with COVID?

B.L.: In 2019, we reached a decision that our cost structure was out of whack where the world was going. So, we restructured to focus around a world that is cross-platform impression based before COVID hit. What we worry about is fully integrating the content information into all of our data sects, which is what he faced before COVID and at present now.

As TV will never be the same, its currency won’t be the same as well and we are going to pivot quickly to impressions on cross-platforms.

Q. Where do you see the future in terms of linear versus digital consumption?

B.L.: Content is king; it always has been and always will be. We are somehow confusing the discussion of linear or AVOD or SVOD, which is not the central issue. It is not about where you watch it; it’s about what is available. And that comes down to the content itself. COVID or no COVID, that will never change. 

For more about Fall TV 2020 -- with the virtual Advanced Advertising Summit, Hispanic Television Summit, Streaming TV Summit and Audience Measurement Summit coming Sept. 8 to Oct. 2 -- visit falltvevents.com. 

Total TV usage, driven higher as people stayed home from work and school to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, dipped 2% in the week of March 30, according to new figures from Nielsen.

The week’s usage was still up 26% from the first full weeks of March and the second highest over the last five weeks.

Live TV was down 2% from the previous week and the use of internet connected devices was down 2%

Looking at local markets, TV usage in Austin, Texas, was up 24.9% in the week of March 30, compared to the week of March 9, the largest increase of any market in the country.

Other markets showing jumps of more than 20% were Salt Lake City, Baltimore, New York, Boston and Miami.

Streaming minutes also declined to 161.4 million minutes from 168.7 million the week before, according to Nielsen. They were up from the first week of March when 127.6 million minutes were streamed and 69.8 million minutes a year ago.

Netflix’s share grew to 33% from 32% the previous week., with YouTube’s share slipping to 19% from 21%. Hulu was steady at 12% and Amazon Prime fell to 7% from 8%.

All of the most viewed SVOD shows were on Netflix, led by the CW’s All American. Tiger King ranked ninth.

Cable news networks are leading a surge in TV viewing as more people are staying home and tuning in because of the Coronavirus crisis, according to data from Comscore.

Comscore says that cable news viewing was up 73% in the week of March 16, compared to the same week a year ago. They are also up 39.8% from a month ago and 7.8% from the previous week.

The biggest increases for the seven news networks tracked by Comscore came in daytime and early fringe.

With the stock market plunging, financial news networks, in particular, were drawing viewers. The two highest networks were up 95% from last year, with an 137% increase in daytime. Comscore did not identify the two of the “highest rated financial news networks” it looked at, but they were most likely CNBC and Fox Business.

The Big Four broadcast networks have seen a 19% increase in viewing compared to a year ago, reversing a long-term trend of viewership erosion. In primetime, the broadcast networks are up 9.4% from a year ago and 3.5% from the previous month, but down 0.7% from the prior week.

The broadcast networks’ biggest gains were in early fringe and daytime. Overnight rating were down as the networks’ late night shows were mainly in reruns.

With most schools closed, children’s programming was up 31%, with a 30.6% gain in daytime. 

Comscore, in what it called an industry-transforming deal, has reached an agreement with Comcast to integrate set-top-box viewing data from Comcast homes into its local and national measurement services.

Comcast has not made its consumer data available to audience research companies, limiting the accuracy, granularity and geographic coverage of set-top-box data-based ratings, which has been touted as a census-level approach to measurement. Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit has sold some advertising products that targeted viewers based on Comcast set-top data.

The deal is also a boon for Comscore, which is emerging from several years of turmoil and management following the discovery of accounting issues in its financial reporting. Last September, Comscore settled fraud charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against the company and its former CEO Serge Matta.

“This is a game-changing moment in the history of television measurement,” said Bill Livek, who became CEO of Comscore in November.

“Comscore’s partnership with Comcast is a significant step in our transformation of television measurement, as we have built the largest viewing dataset of second-by-second viewership data that is aggregated across all premium video providers from the device, to the household, to zip, to the market and to the nation,” Livek said.

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Comscore said the Comcast data will make its audience ratings, impressions, advanced audiences and Exact Commercial Ratings products more stable and predictive. That should help its national and local clients attract more revenue from advertisers looking at more trustworthy data.

“As media costs continue to rise, advertisers and agencies are under increasing pressure to demonstrate results,” said Bret Leece, global chief data & innovation officer at Havas Media Group. “This agreement is significant because it strengthens Comscore’s already-massive scale and eliminates uncertainty around TV measurement. For Havas, this combination gives us the confidence to use Comscore as we help grow our client’s business.”

“Comscore has always had the objective to fulfill census-level measurement for TV viewing and with the addition of Comcast, they are well-positioned to deliver on their goal,” said Keith Kazerman, executive VP, digital sales, advanced advertising and research at Discovery. “Bill Livek is already making an immediate and positive impact on Comscore and the industry.

The Comcast data should be incorporated into the Comscore data by the end of the year, Livek said.

"The story is that Comcast believes in what we’re doing, how we’re changing the face of measurement for the benefit of everyone in the ecosystem,” Livek said. The data will help Comscore know what shows people watch and be able to link that to the products they consume.

Comscore’s ratings system, which is based on the big data approach, contrasts with Nielsen’s panel system, which used to base national ratings on the behavior of a few thousand Nielsen homes. Nielsen supplements its panel with set-top box data, but adjusts it based on meter reading coming out of those Nielsen homes.

Using set-top-box data has been criticized because there were some cable operators like Comcast that did not provide data, leaving gaps in national coverage that had to be mathematical models. Big data has also been criticized for under-representing non-cable and minority homes.

“Now we will have a complete view of what everyone is doing and that takes the last objection away on why people were not using us to buy. They were using us to plan [ad campaigns], but this is a gamechanger,” Livek said.

Livek said that the Comcast deal is an indication that after years of being distracted as Comscore went through an expensive and time-consuming re-audit, in the last four months, the company is on a growth trajectory.

Comscore was set to report its quarterly earnings Thursday afternoon and it was expected to report a big gain in local ratings revenue and a small gain in online measurement, which has been declining the past couple of years. In recent months, several online clients have returned to Comscore, including Buzzfeed, the PGA, Publishers Clearinghouse, Revolt Media and Accenture Digital.

“It shows that customers believe again. They’re coming back,” Livek said.

In January, Carol Hinnant was promoted to chief revenue officer, reporting to Chris Wilson, who as chief commercial officer is focused on new initiatives including the measurement of direct-to-consumer platforms.

“We realigned our sales efforts and our product efforts, which is important as we go to market,” said Livek. “The company is going in the right direction, resuming growth, focused again on our customers, improving products and doing what we believe is a transformative deal, not necessarily for Comscore, but for the industry which finally has what it’s been asking for.”

Nielsen confirmed reports that influential media measurement executive Megan Clarke will leave the company at the end of the month to take the helm of an as yet unidentified public company.

Clarken is chief commercial officer of Nielsen Global Media and has been the point person for the measurement giant’s Total Audience Measurement initiative. News that Clarken was resigning was first reported by Variety. 

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Clarken has been instrumental in Nielsen's efforts to develop products that measure audiences across devices and platforms. Prior to being named chief commercial officer in January, Clarken was president, Nielsen Watch, as well as president, product leadership.

“After 15 years at Nielsen, Megan Clarken will be leaving at the end of the month to take on a new position as chief executive officer of another public company,” Nielsen said in a statement. “Since joining Nielsen in 2004, Megan has held numerous global executive positions in both commercial and product leadership. She was the chief architect of Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement strategy, which has transformed the way the marketplace looks at content and ads across all screens finally providing comprehensive, deduplicated metrics for digital and video. We are extremely proud to see Nielsen talent reach the highest levels, and we wish Megan all the best.” 

With the number of devices and outlets where consumers can access content increasing almost every day, the business of measuring who’s watching what has evolved from a simple count of basic viewership into a near frenzy for increasingly granular information. Advertisers and networks today want not only a baseline profile of who’s watching (age, sex and demographics) but increasingly why they’re watching, where they’re watching and whether they’re paying attention to what’s on-screen.

That has given birth to a whole new subset of the typical TV-measurement business, one that is becoming increasingly important as advertisers look to target their messages and networks search for niche programming that can address the needs and wants of a specific audience. While ratings pioneers Nielsen and Comscore still dominate the measurement of broader audiences, increasingly these smaller, privately owned niche players are carving out their own piece of the measurement segment by diving deeper into audience habits and desires.

“It’s not to say that Nielsen or Comscore are bad or wrong,” TVision Insights president Luke McGuinness said. “The industry is evolving and bringing more digital-like metrics and more data-driven strategies to their TV investment. The market trends are in favor of looking at other metrics and analytics that can be used, in some cases, in parallel with the Nielsen and Comscore data set to tell a more complete story.”

The idea, then, is not to replace Nielsen or Comscore, but to enhance their ratings information with data that dives deeper and deeper into audiences.

Demos Don’t Go Far Enough

“Gender and age was great when everybody was watching TV at the same time, and if you’re doing an image or branding ad and your goal is to reach almost the entire audience,” TV [R]ev co-founder and lead analyst Alan Wolk said. “But today, people are watching at so many different times. They’re bingeing, they’re watching linear, they’re watching on different platforms and services like Tubi, they’re watching YouTube and other places were they might see your commercial. It’s important to track their viewing all across the media landscape.”

Dozens of companies have emerged to provide data that can be tweaked and massaged to paint a fuller audience picture. And today, instead of just tracking the biggest show with the biggest audience to drop ads into, ad buyers and sellers can use this increasingly granular data to track demand for a show, genre or performer; how much attention a viewer is paying to a show (and its commercials); whether the viewer is watching that show inside or outside the home (and whether it would make sense to target an ad to that specific person based on their location); and whether that ad is translating into actual sales.

So TV is far from dead. And though the landscape has obviously changed dramatically, even the tech gurus who track viewership believe the medium has more than enough life left in it.

“If I dug a grave every time somebody said that TV was dead, I’d be in China right now,” Inscape founder and senior vice president of product Zeev Neumeier said. Inscape, a division of TV manufacturer Vizio, generates and licenses data from about 11 million smart TV sets from owners who have opted in to ad-technology companies, media buyers and networks. That data is increasingly being used by other measurement companies.

Here is a look at some of the companies carving out their own niches in the measurement game.

Assessing Demand

“It’s not just about measurement,” Parrot Analytics vice president of marketing Samuel Stadler said. “It’s about solving problems and ad opportunities.” Parrot tracks content demand from several different sources, including social media, research activities with which audiences are engaging and free streaming and downloading — what others would call piracy — to track the demand for specific content.

“We’re focused on industry workflows, we’re focused on pertinent questions of value creation, helping our studio clients, network clients, SVOD platform clients that we work with capture more value, create more value,” Stadler said.

One example: A studio or network client could use Parrot data when deciding to launch a specific channel in a particular location, whether to purchase particular programming in a market or, if it is successful in a specific market, where it should go next.

Parrot’s data set is huge. Stadler said the company tracks more than 1.5 billion daily expressions of demand in more than 100 languages and in over 100 markets.

“It is a truly global data set,” Stadler said. “What we can say about the U.S. market we can easily say about South Korea, for entire regions. We can do regional comparisons, we can do platform on platform, series on series, market on market.”

It is vastly important that the data come from multiple sources and that information be weighted based on the relative length of importance it should give each source, Stadler said, adding that more weight is given to a person actually downloading content.

“Consumption is weighted and is given far more importance than a single ‘like’ or ‘share,’ ” he said.

Assessing demand for content can be used in several different ways. In addition to assessing existing shows, Stadler said, Parrot can also track demand for long-canceled series and for shows that haven’t aired yet. “Often, we are actually brought in even pre-script and to help assess actor and [actress], meaning, ‘Can you help us predict if this show will be successful?’ ” Stadler noted. That is a harder question to answer, given all the variables that make a successful show.

“We’re not saying that data should replace these decades of user experiences that people have when they decide or make some of these decisions,” he said. “What we’re saying is let’s give data a seat at the decision-making table, which we think it really is deserving in this day and age where it is actually possible to collect billions of data points on a daily basis.”

In determining the overall ratings strength of programming, networks and advertisers are taking an increasingly harder look at where consumers are watching, whether it is at the local bar, restaurant or at a friend’s house. Nielsen has the Portable People Meter, which tracks out-of-home viewership based on a digital watermark picked up by its device when a Nielsen “family” member watches TV away from home.

Listening in to Viewing

Tunity takes a different approach. By downloading a free app on a phone, consumers can hear the audio from a set outside of the house — they are usually muted as to not disturb other patrons — by scanning a set with their device’s built-in camera. Consumers reveal some basic age, sex and demographic data to download the app, and the Tunity app takes that information and combines it with location data.

About 2.5 million people have downloaded the Tunity app, Tunity head of research and analytics Paul Lindstrom said, and from 150,000 to 250,000 consumers actively use it each month. That’s about 10,000 to 15,000 people per day.

According to Lindstrom, much of linear-TV measurement is geared toward audio. Devices pick up a code that’s embedded in the sound of a show to determine what is being watched. For digital measurement, video is the base, which he said can create a downward bias for linear TV.

An example: Two patrons are sitting at a bar, one watching NFL Thursday Night Football on their phone — through Amazon — and another watching the game via the establishment’s 60-inch TV. According to Lindstrom, the Amazon watcher is counted whether he can hear the broadcast or not, while the patron watching the game doesn’t get counted.

“There’s something wrong there, particularly when you could get to the point that Fox gets somewhere in the neighborhood of five times the unmeasured out-of-home audience in the U.S. that Amazon gets worldwide with those same games,” Lindstrom said.

A good rule of thumb is that networks should expect audience-lift levels of as much as 40% for major sports, 20% to 25% for minor sports and 15% to 25% for news programs when out-of-home is factored in, according to Lindstrom. Entertainment programs, less-significant events and awards shows are liable to be more in the 10% to 15% range, he said, with more traditional entertainment programming probably in the single digits.

While sports programming usually generates the most out-of-home viewing, there can be some surprises. For example, during the daytime, HGTV regularly has four or five of the top 10 most-watched programs outside the home each week, according to Lindstrom.

“On the surface, you wouldn’t necessarily figure that HGTV would be a big out-of-home viewing source,” he said, but its shows are family friendly; they’re not serial, meaning you can watch a show without having to have viewed prior episodes; and they’re self-contained, within a 30-to-60-minute format.

“You end up in a spot where you can watch it easily and it lends itself both to be curated and to being viewed,” he said.

Heads Up!

As the fragmentation of content distribution has led to more choices for consumers, for advertisers, it presents a problem when the target audience can be distracted by the different devices at their disposal — smartphones, tablets and laptops. In the past, just knowing that the TV was on was good enough for some advertisers. Now, they are increasingly demanding to know who is in the room watching and whether or not they are engaging with the content. Ads lose their effectiveness if no one’s paying attention.

TVision figured out a way to measure that about four years ago, developing an opt-in panel that uses facial recognition and skeleton tracking to follow who is in the room and whether they are engaging with the content on the TV screen.

“TV has a viewability problem, where often advertisers are buying these ads and they might be playing in an empty room where there’s no real opportunity for somebody to see those ads,” TVision's McGuinness said. “We’ve created this technology and this data as a means to enable advertisers to measure that and optimize for it.”

He cited a recent Interpublic Group study that said advertisers spend about $60 billion annually on TV ads. While audiences are counted when a TV set is on, 29% of the time there is no one in the room watching TV.

“That’s a ballpark [$17] billion that is being spent on ads that no one could possibly see,” McGuinness said. “The size of the opportunity to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness is huge.”

TVision data also can determine if an audience sticks around for some ads but not others, he said, information that can be used to determine the effectiveness of ads and whether an advertiser needs to tweak its creative content.

Viewers aren’t just watching their traditional networks and content on their TVs, tablets and smartphones. As younger audiences spend more time online, watching content on YouTube, Instagram and via other social-media outlets, being able to single out where those eyeballs are going isn’t the only concern. In the internet world, attaching a brand to the right online “influencer” is also growing in importance.

CreatorIQ has developed technology that tracks the content created globally by influencers — numbering more than 15 million profiles across all the major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch and others each day. With CreatorIQ, a client can find out which so-called influencers are more geared toward their product, and market accordingly.

“We’re able to help brands identify which influencers reach the audiences they are interested in, and what types of influencers, based on their content,” CreatorIQ senior vice president, head of sales Jonathan Kroopf said.

Brands also have to be cautious when selecting influencers, Kroopf said. He pointed to one client that engaged several food influencers to create healthy meals on a budget. That content was all tied at the end to a product designed to help people track their spending.

“What a brand will look to do is try to tie in their product organically to the influencers’ content, versus force-feeding them and having the influencer create content that is completely irrelevant to their audience,” Kroopf said.

Totally Tubular

Tubular Labs CEO Rob Gabel said tracking internet video has become an essential tool for marketers, as the internet has evolved from a digital newspaper where most of the content was text to a video-centric medium.

“The audiences have moved, especially the younger audiences,” Gabel said. “They are consuming a lot of video on social media on these platforms like live-streaming, Twitch and YouTube, as well as short-form on-demand. There’s over 1 trillion views per month on short-form, basically new media.” Those audiences are now global, to boot.

Tubular tracks social-media video, which works out to be about 6 billion snippets of content. It only tracks business-oriented video created by public figures — so no Facebook videos of the family vacation — which it then classifies by taxonomy.

Clients can use Tubular data in a couple of ways, Gabel said. Just as Nielsen ratings can determine the strength of shows with certain age and gender demographics, Tubular can show their strength globally across all media. And the data can get a lot more granular. For example, in searching for food videos, Tubular can tell which specific types of food content performs best — like vegan or health foods and salad videos versus barbecue videos. “That helps our customers craft their content campaigns,” Gabel said.

Actions Speak Loudest

At iSpot.tv, the focus lately has been not only on tracking ad performance across platforms, but on actual consumer actions — determining how effective a TV ad spot is in driving consumers to actually buy a product.

iSpot.tv got its start in 2012 by uncoupling ads from programming in order to show how a particular ad performs and whether it was intended as part of a broader media buy or inserted into a particular individual’s TV set. “We collect [Inscape] data from the 11 million smart TVs, and then we match it up against our airing schedules and figure out if it’s a linear ad, a local market ad or if it’s addressable,” iSpot.tv CEO Sean Muller said. “But now we have to balance it up against U.S. Census [data]. That’s a very complex process, because these TVs aren’t an exact representation of the U.S. We have to correct for demographic skews that exist in the TV population both from a geographical and demographics perspective. We scale it up to the U.S.”

iSpot.tv customers include all the major networks and agencies. “We help them shift dollars from the underperforming areas to areas that are either performing or where they’re not investing and we predict they will get performance, creating a secondary layer on top of age and gender targeting that is much more focused on driving outcomes from them,” Muller said.

In essence, Muller said the iSpot.tv system allows an advertiser to determine the incremental revenue generated by in-store sales from every network, every program and all the creative they put on TV.

“They know if they spend $1 on TNT in daytime, they will get a $1.65 in return in incremental sales,” Muller said as a hypothetical example. “It gets that granular. … That’s where this industry is moving.”

A+E Networks and AMC Networks are beta testing Comscore Campaign Ratings, the company’s cross-platform ad measurement product.

“As consumers are engaging with History, Lifetime and A&E programming across multiple platforms, it is important that we understand and measure the impact of advertising,” said Don Robert, executive VP, research, at A+E Networks. “Our goal is to measure the unduplicated audience across linear TV and digital platforms so that no audience is discounted.”

The Comscore Campaign Ratings beta program launched in September of this year in consortium with 12 media brand partners.

“In a convergent television environment, it’s critical for us to measure and understand our audiences and the overlap between platforms,” said Tom Ziangas, senior VP of reserach at AMC Networks. “This product addresses our advertisers core need to quantify unduplicated audiences, as well as allows us to better articulate our strengths across linear TV and digital.”

Comscore, which started in digital measurement, has expanded into TV where it would be taking on market leader Nielsen. After a delay caused by the discovery of accounting issues three years ago that resulted in an arduous re-audit of its financial statements, the company has begun to offer new products aimed at cross-platform video measurement.

The future success of audience research could be defined by the industry’s ability to offer data transparency, but reaching that lofty goal might be difficult to achieve in the short run, executives said during a panel session Wednesday at the TV Data Summit.

Executives speaking at the Data Analytics: TV's New Table Stakes panel, said that while there’s a lot of TV data available, deciphering what through the numbers to determine the most efficient data remains difficult.

“When we look at TV data we see retaining ID’s that couldn’t possibly be the same ID’s over and over again,” said Beth Logan, chief data scientist for dataxu. “I think what we really have to do is be really vigilant about checking those metrics.”

Added Ben Tatta, co-founder & president of 605, a television data and analytics company: “We need to do more on the transparency side. It takes a lot to make a data set representative, whether its representative nationally, or representative of the household. Blending the data sets together to get a more holistic view is essential, but I also think the method by which that happens needs to be disclosed.

Dativa CTO and chief data scientist Tom Weiss also said that its extremely difficult to be transparent given all of the information available. “We have to be transparent but we’re not mature and stable enough where we can expect everyone doing this to be at the same level of understanding," he said.

Added Tatta: “Its wonderful that there’s as variety of data sets that are available, and there’s a lot of companies with really smart people managing that,” Tatta said. “In the past there’s been a hesitancy to reveal [methodology] that because that’s our secret sauce, but at the same time I think it’s really important to have full transparency with clients.”

Read More: Complete Coverage of the TV Data Summit

With regard to analytic transparency, Roku’s head of ad and programming research Dan Robbins said the industry is “getting better at” but still has a ways to go. "I don’t think we’re there yet but we spend a lot of time trying to be diligent and rigorous about making sure that folks that we partner with have a good sense of what’s going on,” he said. 

With viewership increasing rapidly on its ad-based platform, and lacking tools to effectively measure it, Roku said it is partnering with 11 research companies to count eyeballs across the entire “marketing funnel.”

Included in the Measurement Partner Program are Nielsen, comScore, ResearchNow, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Acxiom, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, Kantar, Placed, Factual, and Polk.

While no individual research company has delivered entirely on what marketers say they want when they advertise on an OTT platform—the kind of granular data you get when you market through, say, Google—each of these entities has expertise in the texture of at least one portion of the proverbial elephant.

Currently, OTT platforms command only around $2 billion of a U.S. television advertising budget worth about $70 billion annually.

Related: Roku: ‘We Now Uniquely Deliver 10% of Adults 18-34’

“As OTT becomes a larger share of their annual ad spend, brands are actively seeking trusted third-party measurement,” said Dan Robbins, director of ad and programming research for Roku. “Roku is committed to providing an open ad platform that ensures marketers have a wide variety of tools and standards to benchmark against.”

Roku reported a 57% spike in revenue in the second quarter to $156.8 million, with the company now getting the lion’s share of its money now from advertising as opposed to device sales.

“I think the big takeaway for us is this is really the first year in which advertisers are proactively planning for OTT as part of their annual TV spending plan,” said Scott Rosenberg, general manager of platform business for Roku, speaking during his company’s August earnings call. "Roku now uniquely delivers 10% of adult 18 to 34. So if you're planning against that critical demo, you’ve got to include OTT in your planning process. (Quote provided by Seeking Alpha.)

As an example of how Roku is working with its research partners, the company pointed to a Jack in the Box campaign that ran on its platform. According to partner Placed, the campaign drove more than 164,000 store visits from December 2017 to February 2018, with 43% of those visits coming from new customers. 

Nielsen said its board of directors have expanded its strategic review beyond to disposition of the company’s buy segment and could lead to a sale of the company.

The expanded review includes an assessment of a broad range of options, including continuing to operate as a public, independent company; a separation of either Nielsen's Buy or Watch segment; or a sale of the company, the company said.

Nielsen in July launched the review of its buy segment, which has been a drag on the company’s earnings. In the second quarter buy segment revenue was down 4.1% to $789 million. Nielsen’s buy segment provides marketing information about what people buy on a global basis.nt

Nielsen’s stock plunged when it announced the strategic review, lower earnings and CEO Mitch Barns’ plans to retire.

Following those announcements in August, hedge fund Elliott Management announced it owned an 8.8% stake in Nielsen and urged the company to put itself up for sale.

Nielsen said its expanded strategic review is being led by James Attwood, executive chairman of the board. The company has hired J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Guggenheim Securities LLC as financial advisors, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as legal counsel in connection with the review.

"The Board continues to support the company's strategic priorities, including Total Audience, the Connected System and our operational transformation, including cost out initiatives and consolidations designed to increase agility. However, the Board believes that a broad review of strategic alternatives is in the best interest of the company and its shareholders," said Attwood. "As the Board conducts its review, we and our valued associates remain focused on providing clients with the most complete understanding of what consumers watch and buy with mission critical data that enables markets around the world to act faster, more efficiently and with greater confidence."

Nielsen’s board said it is moving “expeditiously” but has not set a timetable for the completion of the review and that there was no assurance the review will result in a transaction.

Hulu issued some revealing data this week that shines some light on how the OTT service has become a hub for binge-viewing, defined, in this case, as watching three to five episodes in succession.

Hulu said that 44% of its viewers binge at least once a week, and that the average viewer is watching ten different shows at one time, typically a mix of Hulu originals, comedies, dramas and reality shows.

Among other stats, Hulu said 29% of subs binge watch more often today than they did last year. Shows that are new to the viewer drives most binge-viewing on Hulu, followed by original series and “old favorites.” 

Hulu also drilled down on some binge-trends for specific shows and series.

Within the past year, more than 11,000 Hulu subs watched all 15 seasons (or 335 episodes) of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and nearly 130,000 watched all 180 episodes of The Golden Girls in an average of two months. And some 35,000 viewers binged out on the full ten season of Futurama in an average of 18 days, equating to about eight episodes per day.

Hulu also noted that nearly 30,000 viewers binged on all 192 episodes of Full House via the service in one month.

Those findings represent a snapshot of binge-viewing trends on Hulu, which has about 20 million subscribers, a total that includes SVOD-only subscribers and subs take Hulu's new Live TV service, which also includes the SVOD component.

While networks fret that they’ve been abandoned by younger viewers, Nielsen said they’re watching linear TV content, but they’re not sitting in the living room while they're watching.

It’s true that younger viewers are among the most active video streamers, but the relatively affluent members of the millennial generation and Generation Z are also watching linear TV content in out-of-home locations, according to a new Nielsen report.

With Nielsen measuring out of home viewing more thoroughly, and more ad buyers accepting out-of-home viewing among the impressions they pay for, the finding could mean extra dollars for TV networks.

Related: Nielsen Offers Quicker Data on Out-of-Home Viewing

ESPN was one of the first networks to subscribe to Nielsen’s Out-of-Home reporting service and use those extra viewers in negotiations with advertisers. Adding viewing in bars, health clubs, offices and mass transit lifts ESPN’s viewership by 8.5%, the network said.

Turner and CBS have also signed up for Nielsen’s Out-of-Home service.

Related: ESPN Touts Effectiveness of Commercials Seen Out of Home

In its new report, Nielsen looked at all out-of-home viewing during 2017. It found that 39% of all out-of home-viewing came from Gen Z and millennials, or 14% more than their national in-home viewing.

News viewing is usually thought to be largely confined to older viewers, but when looking at out-of-home consumption, the share represented by millennials and Gen Zers nearly tripled. Gen X’s share was also higher out-of-home (23%) than in-home (18%).

Nearly half of the out-of-home viewing for sports came from Gen Z and millennials.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Xumo, the company behind a free, ad-supported OTT service for smart TVs and mobile devices, said its service will be tracked by Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings.  

Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings are a component of the company’s Total Audience Measurement platform, which measures audience segments across digital platforms and devices using metrics that are comparable to traditional TV.  

That integration will enable Nielsen to offer insight and custom reports and a “deeper view” of Xumo streaming data, they said.  

"This is an important move for XUMO that allows the power of our OTT platform to be measured side-by-side with established players in the traditional TV space," Chris Hall, senior vice president of product at Xumo, said in a statement.  

RELATED: Xumo Streams in Local Now 

Xumo said its platform currently offers more than 140 digital channels in smart TVs from companies such as LG Electronics, Sharp, Vizio and Hisense, mobile apps, and Roku players. Xumo has also been integrated with set-tops deployed by Layer3 TV, the Denver-based MVPD that is now part of T-Mobile.  

RELATED: Layer3 TV Expands OTT Slate With Xumo 

TV shows and series typically serve as the point of “first engagement” for new Netflix and Hulu subscribers, 7Park Data found in an analysis of U.S. viewing data over the period of about a year.

TV series, rather than other types of content like movies, was the first engagement for 70% of new Netflix subscribers, and 88% among new Hulu customers, 7Park Data figured from data that was collected and analyzed from Feb. 1, 2017 to Jan. 9, 2018.

7Park Data said the insight is important in part because the kind of content that new customers consume on the first day of their subscriptions can make the difference between a brief trial and a long-standing relationship. It also sheds some light on the types of content that compel a consumer to subscribe.

Though TV was a top first engagement category from a general sense for new Hulu and Netflix subscribers, there are some differences in the genres that resonated most in the early going.

For Hulu, comedy shows, at 19%, was the top genre watched first by new subs, followed by dramas (16%), animation (10%), sci-fi (9%) and adventure. For Netflix, dramas (21%) led the  way, followed by comedies (11%), thrillers (9%), crime-related shows and mysteries (8% each). 

And although dramas were most often watched first by new Netflix subs, the data also showed that comedies drove overall Netflix TV streaming, 7Park Data found, noting that it shows that consumers often seek some levity to balance out their initial focus on drama-focused shows.

On a global, average basis, the three top “streamed first” titles from Netflix during the data collection period were Stranger Things, 13 Reasons Why and Narcos. Top licensed series on Netflix were The Walking Dead, Riverdale, Rick & Morty, Vikings, Grey’s Anatomy, and Breaking Bad. The top original series were Black Mirror, House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, according to 7Park Data’s study.

To obtain its findings, 7Park Data uses a on a proprietary process that uses a passive, opt-in collection of data from a global sample of more than two million active Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon users.

Outdoor enthusiast network Pursuit Channel said it has reached a new long-term agreement with ratings giant Nielsen that will allow it to better report on the size and demographics of its television audience.

“While previously Pursuit had relied on third-party audience measurement from other providers it has concluded that with recent expansion onto additional distribution platforms and strong audience response to its improving programming schedule, it is time to move to Nielsen,” said Pursuit Channel CEO Rusty Faulk in a statement. “We look forward to working with Nielsen to develop deeper insights into avid viewers of the outdoors TV category.”

Pursuit Channel focuses on outdoor lifestyle programming with shows like Destination Baja, Ducks Unlimited TV, Fly Rod Chronicles, Deer and Deer Hunting and Gamekeepers of Mossy Oak. The network is distributed nationally on linear and digital television systems including DirecTV HD (604 PRST), AT&T HD (1644 PRST) and Dish Network (393 PRST) subscribers, and it is available to all Verizon FiOS (818 PRST) and CenturyLink Prism (1677 PRST) subscribers. Pursuit Channel first launched in 2008.

“Our brand has risen quickly becoming one of the highest profile brands in outdoor enthusiast entertainment with high quality content and emotionally connected viewers,” said Pursuit Channel head of U.S. ad sales and investment Scott Boos in a statement. “Along with this rapid growth comes a responsibility to the advertising community to provide the very best analytics available. We take that responsibility seriously and joining forces with the Nielsen family is at the center of the business model.”

The television industry has been clamoring for a solution on attribution for obvious reasons — cord-cutting and digital have been eating into TV ad budgets, and the industry is looking for sophisticated measurement solutions to understand TV’s impact on return.

It’s why executives from Viacom, Fox, Discovery Communications, Time, ABC, ESPN and many more met in October to discuss the possibility of adding a new measurement metric with the focus on attribution and outcomes. Code named “Thor,” the solution could satiate the cravings TV advertisers are having to tie their commercials to something they have long sought — namely, proof their six-, 15-, 30- and 60-second ads result in tangible purchases. The need for better measurement for TV is evident.

Related: Networks Plan Q1 Test of Data Plus Math Ad Attribution Platform

Unlike its digital counterparts, TV can be notoriously challenging to measure, but it’s also one of the most powerful channels in the marketing toolbox. TV advertising can help reach a massive amount of people — quickly — but proper measurement has been a tough nut to crack.

Making a Complex Task Possible
TV has become part of a holistic experience deeply connected to digital activities. And marketers have tried to keep up by adapting the formats we use. There is no longer a straight line from long form DRTV to 1-800 numbers or from vanity URLs to purchase. It’s all a part of a more complex journey, and it should be measured as such.

While the ways that we watch and advertise on TV have changed, its dominance of budgets has not. With so much of the marketing budget at stake, accurate return on investment isn’t just a nice piece of the pie, it should be your No. 1 measurement priority. This is where TV attribution comes into play.

Effective TV attribution requires a data science-driven approach instead of assumptions, intuition and other questionable correlations that could be used to describe the “good enough” measurement techniques of the past. An analytically robust approach to TV attribution helps marketers measure the impact of TV and return on investment. It approaches performance TV measurement differently by applying analytics to TV data and uncovering what’s truly working and why. It calculates how well you’re hitting your business objectives, extracts value from your current data and, perhaps most importantly, definitively proves ROI.

As with all measurement plans, successfully implementing these metrics depends on organizational readiness in three primary areas: data, technology and cultural framework. TV attribution is no exception. Whether you’re handling the analytics in-house or partnering with a solution provider, you’ll need to be prepared to ensure successful implementation. To help you do this, here are three steps to get started.

Define Your Business Goals
TV attribution starts with a clear understanding of what you’re trying to measure and how you want to use that information. A robust measurement practice answers specific and targeted business questions such as:

■ What is my baseline without TV?
■ What is my TV ROI?
■ Where should I spend my next dollar to maximize TV return?
■ What stations, programs and/or creative are most effective?
■ What tactics will get me more scale?
■ How can I get conclusive results for testing with these programs or spots?
■ How does TV influence other channels in my media mix?

Answering these questions will help map the appropriate KPIs needed to ensure everyone is on the same page with what’s being measured and why.

Collect and Prepare Your Data
A necessary component to get up and running with TV attribution is getting access to the right data sets.

Data ownership and governance continues to be a huge issue for marketers. Historical data may be paramount for analysis, but it’s found within multiple silos such as your technology partners and agencies and is spread across multiple systems of record. You need to make sure there is a centralized source of marketing data that partners can feed into — with identified owners — that can be tasked with being accountable for the data. This way, you can ensure the data is supporting the organization’s growth as transitions are made, while also facilitating future analysis.

Having access and ownership of the data gives marketers the ability and control to receive the most up-to-date insights. To enable accurate modeling, I’d recommend having two years of historical data in place to ensure you’re capturing seasonality and dynamic patterns of consumer behavior. A year or more of historical data allows for advanced machine learning algorithms to uncover the most impactful information.

Analyze for Trends and Insights
With your data collected and prepared, you can go beyond basic statistical analysis to find real answers. Depending on your business objectives, you may focus on long-term baselines or short-term impacts. A well-planned approach will help with both.

Once you identify the trends and impacts, the benefits of TV attribution are undeniable and include insights on the best length of the ad, categories or programming changes to cut back on waste and find new customers and evaluate what time of day works best.

Attribution continues to give advertisers and marketers frustrations, but it is critical for the industry to achieve ROI. TV attribution provides marketing organizations with a powerful way to make effective decisions and get the best return possible for TV media spend — and a solution can be implemented in as fast as a couple of weeks. TV marketers shouldn’t have to settle for “good enough,” and with these steps and paths crossed, you’ll be able to gain fast, accurate, actionable insights designed to drive business impact.

Brian Baumgart is co-founder and CEO of Conversion Logic, a cloud-based marketing analytics platform.

The only thing more complicated than trying to count viewers as they consume content on multiple digital devices might be trying to keep track of financial developments at measurement company comScore. When comScore, best known for tracking online users, in January 2016 acquired Rentrak — which used set-top box data to measure video-on-demand playback — it appeared to be forming a competitor to Nielsen, which dominates the TV ratings business.

But two months later, comScore disclosed that accounting issues had turned up in its financial statements. It would then go through a painstaking re-audit; a number of top executives, including two CEOs — co-founder Gian Fulgoni and Serge Matta — would in time leave the company. Analysts said comScore appeared too distracted, new product development slowed and, at the end of last year, there was a round of layoffs.

Activist shareholder Starboard Value LP helped comScore refinance in January, providing the company with $150 million in new cash. And the re-audit is expected to end soon, with the company saying it will release restated financial results by the end of March.

With all of that behind it, will comScore be able to compete with Nielsen, to give networks, media buyers and advertisers the advanced metrics they need to measure the new ways viewers are consuming content?

Bill Livek, executive vice chairman and president at comScore, said he believes it will, saying pointedly that comScore is back.

And Laura Martin, analyst at Needham & Co., expects comScore to be able to compete once its financials are squared away.

“Brands really want a second choice,” she said. “Content [owners] really want a second choice. They do not want to be monopolistically dependent on Nielsen.” And they’re willing to spend to support comScore, because if they don’t, “Nielsen raises its price, so you wind up paying more anyway.”

Nielsen declined to comment on comScore. But for the past few years, it has been working on its Total Audience approach to measurement.

Jessica Hogue, senior vice president of product leadership at Nielsen, said the measurement giant’s framework has been designed to be flexible and to support the different business models its clients could employ.

At times, there has been resistance to both Nielsen’s approach and the results that came from it. But Hogue said Nielsen has been working closely with clients to meet their measurement needs.

“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of progress, not just in our ability to get the capability to market, but in the different ways clients have been able to take advantage of it,” she said.

Hogue pointed to the way ESPN has used components of Nielsen’s Total Audience system to measure its live audience. She also noted that Nielsen worked with Turner to leverage video-on-demand ratings that go beyond the confines of a seven-day window. A number of clients have also taken advantage of new out-of-home audience measurement.

Last year, Nielsen extended its Digital and TV Ratings, which measure linear TV viewed on a digital screen; the extension would bring in platforms such as YouTube Live and Hulu. This year, the market is focused on connected TV and over-the-top viewing. “It’s already part of our program in the total audience framework,” so marketers will be able to leverage that measurement and continue to grow that marketplace, Hogue said.

“We’ll add features that also allow our clients to make business decisions in new and different ways,” she said.

Nielsen and comScore come at the issues taking different approaches.

“I would say that historically, which is their starting point, comScore looks at the world much more granularly from the set-top box data — which they would call census-based — versus panel-based, which is where Nielsen comes from. That’s a big difference,” Martin said.

In an interview, Livek spoke with Multichannel News  about where his company is and where it’s headed. An edited transcript follows.

MCN:comScore has been in the news a lot for all the wrong reasons. At this point, do you guys have the financial resources and stability to really get in there and compete in this increasingly complex measurement space?
Bill Livek: comScore’s back.

MCN:Back from where?
BL: comScore’s back. We had what I believe is a financial hiccup of doing a re-audit. And we announced that by the end of March we will be issuing these audited financials.

While that was going on, we’ve been refocused on our cross-platform efforts. And that’s in digital and TV and, of course, the movie business. We’re in a phenomenal business at the right time.

The industry is consolidating. You have Disney acquiring [assets of 21st Century] Fox; you have AT&T acquiring Time Warner. Embodied in the DNA of those big deals are movie studios, TV networks and digital distribution that goes direct to the consumer.

And at comScore, we’re measuring how people are being entertained and informed across all the different platforms.

MCN: Doesn’t consolidation mean you have fewer, bigger clients and doesn’t that give them more leverage over you?
BL: I think it’s a great thing for comScore that you have more incentive for companies to have great measurement and figure out a way to attract the right consumers, whether it’s a piece of content being released on the big screen at the movie theater, or whether it’s being released on your television set and then very quickly going on your digital device or on your digital device at the same time that it’s going to your TV set.

The epicenter of all these big mergers are companies that have information about their consumer, but comScore plays in the center about understanding how the consumer is interacting on all these different platforms.

And that’s why we’ve got a great business. We’re positioned quite well and we’re excited about what we do every day here.

MCN: The company has gone through a couple of CEOs over the past couple years. Who will be running the company long-term?
BL: The board has hired a search company and it’s evaluating internal and external candidates.

MCN: What can comScore do better than anybody else in the measurement world?
BL: Embodied in comScore’s DNA, it’s really interesting: We have digital in our roots, TV measurement in our roots and a love for movie measurement in our roots. And because of that, and because, literally, all entertainment now is digital, we think that we have a leg up on anyone.

We’re in a great place measuring the consumer wherever they’re entertained and informed, in any and every platform.

MCN: How do you do that?
BL: We do it in a lot of ways. Some of the ways we do it are with our census tags, where owners of content embed the comScore tag into their content. We call that our census tag. We have our media metrics panel and we also are pulling back video-on-demand from literally every set-top box in the United States that is video-on-demand-enabled and we also, at the same time, are pulling back linear television.

So, the combination of census-like currency and massive and passive information creates a great environment to measure consumers.

MCN: You’ve always gotten a ton of data from set-top boxes. Are you also getting data from connected TV?
BL: We can’t comment on what we’re doing with connected TVs, but connected TVs are a piece of the ecosystem, an important piece of where the future is going.There’s a lot of viewing via streaming and over-the-top of all types and we’re getting a great deal of that.

MCN: What part does your Total Home Panel play?
BL: Our Total Home Panel is a look at the future. We’re getting a lot of learnings from the Total Home Panel. From a strategy standpoint long-term, we’re evaluating it. But we’ve learned a great deal about the connected home, about all the different devices that consumers are using.

MCN: Are you guys able to measure the streamers? Can you tell me how many people are watching a particular program on Netflix, for example?
BL: Our point of view is if it’s not ad-supported, it’s not on the top of our priority list. Now our Total Home Panel gives us an idea of understanding how an advertiser can reach a viewer who is principally a Netflix viewer, and how they can reach them on a lot of the other digital platforms that are available.

MCN: TV viewing is measured one way and online video another. What will comScore do to create an apples-to-apples comparison? Will media buyers be able to buy both with a single metric?
BL: First off, we don’t think that media buyers will be using a single metric in the future. We believe they’re going to be using a basket of currencies, primarily two.

It also depends on where the ad load is. If the ad load is principally on digital, we’ll be seeing digital impressions. If it’s on TV, it will be a television impression, quarter-hour average minute or exact commercial rating. And one of the benefits that we have with what we do is to be able to look at that viewer and how they’re using television across all those platforms.

But our goal is to super-serve the media owners and super-serve the advertisers who are trying to reach a highly targeted consumer. And the good news about all these big data sources is that we can go beyond an age and gender definition of the consumer. And you have advertisers who are on a relentless quest of understanding whether those commercials resulted in some motivation to want to buy a product or, in fact, buy a product.

And the definition of a consumer is complicated. That’s why at comScore we really invented the whole idea of having these advanced demographics, like the cars that we drive, our intent to purchase, products that we buy in grocery stores. And how we vote, whether we are a persuadable voter or a hardened individual for one or the other party.

MCN: You’re talking about the shift to audience buying. Are you guys enabling media owners trying to shift away from Nielsen age/sex demographics to audience targeting?
BL: We’re the leader in it. We’re proud to be a participant in OpenAP with the networks who are involved, because they see the big value in comScore’s advanced targets.

MCN: How’s the relationship with OpenAP?
BL: Our relationship is very deep and wide with the networks that are participating in it.

MCN: Are you guys involved in attribution, measuring how much media advertising contributes to product sales?
BL: The answer is yes. We have a lot of advertisers who are trying to figure out, did the ad schedule actually result in moving product? You have a mega-trend out there and I think the epicenter of it is around 3G Capital and Kraft Heinz. Their premise is that if the ads, for them to have value, they have to see that it motivated a consumer to go and buy the brand or in fact buy the brand.

So there is a growing trend of advertisers who want to do that type of work, knowing that the ad schedules did in fact work. And when you have big data sets like we have at comScore, it’s an important ingredient in terms of trying to figure that out.

MCN: People see you competing with Nielsen. Do you see spaces where Nielsen is vulnerable?
BL: When we wake up in the morning we don’t even think about the competitive landscape. We think about our customer and how their business is evolving. And if this were a hockey game, we would want to anticipate where the puck’s going, and that’s where we put our energies.

We think we’ve built a great business here. And we trust that our customers see that also.

MCN: We were surprised to see the announcement by Sinclair Broadcast Group that they were back in the local measurement business with Nielsen. Does that say anything about their confidence in comScore and its products?
BL: You would have to ask Sinclair on that. We have a great relationship with Sinclair. Call it a fantastic relationship. And we work with all of their television stations across all of their markets and it’s just a great relationship. We would never comment on their right to buy anyone else.

MCN: comScore offered free viewability measurement via validated Campaign Essentials (vCE). Did a lot of clients take that offer?
BL: We’re doing a lot of really interesting work in that space and we plan on having a customer day in the future here so we can share a lot of the specifics. But it’s certainly a growing trend that advertisers want to make sure that their ads are being seen in a safe environment, particularly in this day and age in 2018.

MCN: Any other recent product launches gaining traction?
BL: All of our products are gaining different degrees of traction, whether it’s in local, digital or network or cross-platform. This is an evolving business. We’re in a dynamic cross-platform world — literally, it’s a dynamic cross-platform world. And our products will continue to evolve as the consumer’s evolving.

Who would have thought the consumer would be viewing and being entertained on all these different platforms just a few years ago? It’s a great environment, a great time to be a measurement company.

MCN: What’s in the pipeline?
BL: Stay tuned for our cross-platform offerings. We’re in a private release and you’ll be hearing more about those in the future.

MCN: Are they new and different?
BL: We haven’t been talking a lot about what we’re doing in that space, but while we’ve been quiet we’ve been working on a variety of new offerings. And you’ll be hearing more about it in the near term. There will be: You can’t have a wine before it’s time. It’s the same with products.

MCN: Any cool new ways to count viewers on every platform?
BL: A big piece of this is making sure you’re pulling back all the right big databases. You’re not going to have them all, but you’re going to have enough of them that you can statistically correct for the ones that you don’t have.

So we live in a world that’s never been; the dream of being more exact has never been more of a reality. But it gets increasingly complex every month and the thing that our customers keep coming back to us, they know we have the experience in digital and TV and movie measurement and we’re a constantly evolving business in the space of how the consumer’s entertained across all these platforms.

Reaching over-the-top viewers has become an important new strategy for advertisers, content owners and multichannel video service providers, according to a new survey from video ad service company SpotX.

The survey, conducted by Kagan, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence, found that 100% of advertisers said the biggest change in their strategy was the result of changing viewing habits.

The survey’s advertising respondents said they expected higher return on investment on OTT, where they are able to use data and adopt audience-based buying.

Related: fuboTV Connects With SpotX For Programmatic Advertising

While only 11% of advertisers said they spend 21% to 40% of their ad dollars on OTT platforms now, looking ahead two years, 57% of advertisers expect to do so.

Among those advertisers, 44% said they expect to see an 11% to 20% increase in return on advertising spending by moving from traditional ad buying to audience-based buying, with 33% expecting a 6% to 10% increase.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Calling it the most live-streamed Super Bowl ever, NBC said the stream of Sunday’s matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots delivered an average minute audience of 2.02 million viewers, and peaked at 3.1 million concurrent streams.

That streaming audience included consumers who tuned in via the NBC Sports app, at NBCSports.com, NBC.com “TV Everywhere,” the En Vivo app, NFL.com, NFL Mobile from Verizon, the Yahoo Sports app and Verizon’s go90 offering.

NBC Sports Digital’s live stream of Super Bowl LII, powered by its Playmaker Media unit, also saw fans consume 633.7 million live streaming minutes of the game across 6.1 million unique devices, up 185% and 112%, respectively, from NBC’s last live Super Bowl live stream in February 2015 (Super Bowl XLIX between the Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks).

RELATED: NBC Sports Digital Launches ‘Playmaker Media’

NBC also said the in-game average minute audience (AMA) of 2.02 million was up 152% from its streaming coverage of Super Bowl XLIX (800,000 AMA).

RELATED: Super Bowl OTT Feeds Don’t Go Off Glitch-Free

For Super Bowl LI last year between the Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, Fox delivered an AMA of 1.72 million, up 224% from Fox’s previous Super Bowl live stream in 2014. Fox also said that the stream of Super Bowl LI pulled in 4.42 million unique viewers.

RELATED: Fox’s Super Bowl Stream Nets Average Minute Audience of 1.72 Million

“We are excited by the record-breaking consumption as well as the quality of the streams we delivered to football fans,” Rick Cordella, EVP and general manager, Digital Media, NBC Sports Group, said in a statement, which comes as NBC Olympics prepares to live stream 1,800 hours of the Winter Games from PyeongChang, South Korea.

RELATED: NBC Olympics to Live-Stream 1,800 Hours of PyeongChang Winter Games

Though the latest numbers again show the growing popularity of streaming, the TV audience remains far greater, as NBC said the game posted a total audience delivery of 106 million viewers across all platforms based on Fast National data released today by Nielsen Company and digital data from Adobe Analytics. Viewership peaked at 112.3 million from 10:00-10:15 p.m., during the game’s fourth quarter.

NBC noted that the numbers don’t include out-of-home viewers, which won’t be available until Thursday (February 8) from Nielsen. OOH will increase the audience “by several million people,” the network added.

RELATED: fuboTV Says Daily Trials Hit Record During Super Bowl Sunday

The editors of Multichannel News are proud to introduce the 2018 class of Wonder Women, the 20th anniversary class of accomplished and influential women from multichannel media industries to be honored by the magazine. 

The vision, commitment and leadership shown by these executives have fostered the success of their companies while driving overall industry growth and innovation.

Multichannel News is also recognizing 12 Women to Watch, whose ongoing contributions are emblematic of the vital roles they’re likely to play in the industry’s future.

This year’s Wonder Women class will be lauded March 22 at a gala luncheon at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in midtown Manhattan, co-hosted by the New York chapter of Women in Cable Telecommunications. For much more on the event and on this year’s honorees, visit mcnwonderwomen.com.

MCN Wonder Women Class of 2018
Darcy Antonellis, Vubiquity

Kerry Brockhage, NBCUniversal

Christa D’Alimonte, Viacom

Stephanie Druley, ESPN

Marianne Gambelli, Fox News

Sarah Gitchell, Comcast Cable

Beth Main, HBO

Jennifer Mirgorod, Turner

Debra O’Connell, Disney-ABC Television

Elaine Paul, Hulu

Loretta Polk, NCTA

Josie Thomas, CBS Corp.

The Honor Roll: Wonder Women 1999-2017

Related: Celebrating Media's Influential Women

FRIDAY ABERNETHY
Senior Vice President of Content Distribution, Univision Communications Inc.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: At Hispanic-consumer-focused Univision, Friday Abernethy directs content distribution sales and licensing efforts for television and digital platforms across multiple genres. She has executed deals under a variety of business models with all major linear and online distributors. Univision’s portfolio includes Univision, UniMás, Galavisión, Univision Deportes Network, Fusion TV and El Rey Network, plus direct-to-consumer service Univision NOW. Earlier, she was executive VP of distribution sales and marketing for Pop, where she was instrumental in the network’s repositioning. Before that, she was a Viacom content distribution executive for more than a decade, securing carriage for MTV Networks and BET Networks channels. Previously, she held posts at GE Capital and JP Morgan Chase and is involved with Camp Becket and Camp Chimney Corners, helping to send children from all economic backgrounds to summer camp.

MAJOR MENTORS: “My parents served as great role models for me. In addition to dedicating their free time to my brother and me, they have a tremendous work ethic. Further, my parents always supported me in my desire to have a career and instilled in me that I could do anything I wanted. Having grown up in a family with very traditional roles I reflect on this unwavering support with so much gratitude.”

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “The diversity of the work that I do ensures that no day is like any other with the added bonus of being able to advocate for our community.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Force yourself to make time for strategic reflection. Going months or years without regular introspection can lead you down a path you may not have intended.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “Traveling and experiencing new cultures with family.”


JANET BALIS
Partner/Principal, Global Advisory Leader for Media & Entertainment, EY

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: A partner at EY and head of its media and entertainment advisory practice, Janet Balis has deep experience in cross-platform media. Before EY, she was a partner and led the Innovation Lab at Betaworks, a studio of digital startups and investments. Prior to that, she was publisher of the Huffington Post and led sales strategy and partnerships at AOL, including its participation in the first-ever Digital Content Newfronts. Before AOL, she was executive VP, media sales and marketing for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “I like that I get to work across the full industry ecosystem to solve the most pressing issues facing media companies — from broadcast and cable networks, to cable and satellite operators, to film and television studios, to agencies and beyond.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “In my days at AOL, just after the Time Warner merger — where I was at the time — I was fortunate to work for the then-president of AOL Media Networks, Mike Kelly, who went on to be the CEO of The Weather Channel. Mike empowered each of us to transform the business with his unequivocal support. Mike gave us all powerful lessons to shape our success, including the mantra of ‘assume best intent’ and ‘results lag effort.’ To this day, those words shape my thinking.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Great work and delivering what you promise is an ante to be in business — focusing on personal brand, networking and endorsement can be incredible differentiators.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “My downtime is precious and I spend it with my beautiful children and friends. Beyond enjoying everything New York has to offer, I love to exercise, so you’re likely to find me at the gym doing a CrossFit workout, running in Central Park, taking a Flywheel class, raising money for Cycle for Survival — an indoor cycling event raising money for cancer research — or trying to improve my tennis game.”


JOHANNA FUENTES
Executive Vice President, Corporate Communications, Showtime Networks

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Johanna Fuentes is responsible for the strategic planning and execution of all global public and media relations initiatives for Showtime Networks and Smithsonian Channel, including programming publicity, media and talent relations, events, photography, awards, film festivals, philanthropy, sports and corporate branding. She supervises all press outreach, and is the communications liaison with parent CBS. Before joining Showtime in 2010, she was at Bravo and CBS.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “No day is the same. You walk in on any given day with a plan in place and breaking news and deadlines (and more recently social media) have a way of disrupting that order.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “After years working in PR, I got my first break in entertainment 18 years ago when I was hired by Gil Schwartz at CBS and back then reported to Chris Ender. It speaks to the stability of the company that they remain at the helm today. Though I have moved around over the years I have learned the most from them on how to remain cool during a crisis and how to be a great manager. In addition, I worked under Frances Berwick at Bravo who is one of the smartest (and classiest) executives in this industry.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Read every story and watch everything, especially the work of your competitors. It’s important to stay very current so I have prided myself on always staying on top of new technologies. Also, stay hungry. And most importantly, I have learned so much from my industry peers. They may be billed as the competition, but some of my best friends work for rival networks and studios. Make those connections.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “As a Caribbean girl nothing makes me happier than reading a good book while quietly sitting on a beach. My other favorite thing: live music.”


ROZ HO
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Consumer and Metadata, TiVo

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Roz Ho, with more than 25 years of industry experience, holds numerous software and hardware patents and has extensive experience managing engineering teams and key product launches. Before joining TiVo in the spring of 2017, she was VP and head of product management at Ericsson. Earlier she worked at Microsoft, including roles in Microsoft Office, as GM of the Macintosh Business Unit and as corporate VP of premium mobile experiences.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “I get to work in TV! Seriously, this is a very exciting time in the entertainment industry. There are so many changes happening — the explosion of content, cord-cutting, instant on-demand, streaming services, to name a few. Plus new technology such as AI and machine learning that will transform the media and entertainment workflow … Just as important, though, is that I enjoy collaborating with people to brainstorm and build the best TV experiences — team members, customers and partners.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “Lisa Brummel, former executive VP at Microsoft, gave me an opportunity to become a general manager, and then taught me to go after jobs I didn’t think I was 100% qualified for. Another is J Allard, former chief experience officer and chief technology officer for the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft and one of the Xbox creators, who was truly inspirational and visionary.”

CAREER ADVICE: “This sounds so cliché: work on something you are passionate about, and work with people you can connect with. Don’t be afraid of change if you find yourself in a situation where those two conditions are not being met. Never stop learning.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “I like to explore remote corners of the globe (I’ve visited over 100 countries), ski the steep and deep, hike up mountains and dabble in archaeology.”


GEORGIA JUVELIS
Senior Vice President and Co-Head, Corporate Communications, AMC Networks

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Georgia Juvelis oversees all financial and business communications strategy and media relations for AMC’s corporate strategic initiatives and business segments that include AMC Networks International; new digital businesses, including streaming services Sundance Now and Shudder; and IFC Films. She also oversees corporate marketing efforts and internal communications. She joined AMC Networks in 2007 with more than 15 years of experience. She was VP of communications for Gemstar-TV Guide and, before that, owned a PR consulting firm in New York and San Francisco, with clients including Hearst and PBS. She began her career managing publicity for Discovery Communications.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “Fortunately, many things. Since every day is different and the dynamics of the business are changing so fast, my job is never quotidian. There’s always something new coming at me but that’s the fun part and is what keeps me engaged. I also get to work with a group of very creative, thoughtful and smart people who don’t take themselves too seriously and are just fun to be around.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “I’ve been lucky to have worked alongside many mentors through the years who have inspired me, challenged me, even frustrated me. I had a few early on who were very supportive and encouraging, which was especially meaningful as I was just starting out. They not only taught me the foundational elements of great PR, also had a deep understanding of the business and always had each other’s back.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Be impatient with your unhappiness. It’s hard to be great at something you’re not enjoying, and it’s simply not worth staying in a role in which you’re no longer learning or that is stifling you.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “There never seems to be much of it! But I devote most of my free time to my kids, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”


JENNIFER KOESTER
Director of Telco and Video Distribution Partnerships, Google

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Jennifer Koester began her career as an attorney and joined Cablevision Systems in 2005 as vice president of privacy, product management and subpoena compliance. She became senior VP of advanced advertising products and data analytics at Cablevision Media Sales in 2014 before heading to her non-legal role at Google in 2016. Her knowledge and perspective of the television ecosystem helps her increase engagement with Google video distributor partners and drive strategy for future growth opportunities.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “I love the multifaceted dimension of my role at Google. Being in the cross-section of technology, media, data and consumer experience creates both new opportunities and new challenges every day.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “My parents provided me with a solid foundation to balance a strong professional work ethic while being committed to family. Amazing female leaders at Cablevision like Kristin Dolan, Kim Norris and Karen Au Claro inspired me to bring my voice to an industry where women leaders were the minority. Industry icons like Tad Smith and Bonita Stewart saw strength and potential in me.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Understanding that there’s not always one defined path to achieve your aspirations gives you the power to take informed risks, try new roles or explore new industries that will ultimately lead you to realize your full professional potential.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “My downtime is focused on our very active children with snippets of tranquility in the yoga studio or fishing with my husband. Understanding that children grow up quickly, most of my free time is spent on the sidelines of the baseball, soccer and volleyball fields supporting our son and daughter. And we always cook Sunday meals together as a family.”


COLLEEN MORAGHAN
Senior Vice President, Data Solutions, 605

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Colleen Moraghan brings more than 30 years of advertising experience to her new firm, 605. She is responsible for the design, development and delivery of unique and effective technology- driven solutions that increase sales by using set-top box data for audience discovery, media planning and measurement. Earlier, she was VP of audience measurement at Cablevision Systems.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “I love the people. Getting up and coming to work to lead a team of committed and talented people is what inspires me. We are like a family; we all share a passion for the data business and we all support each other as we learn and grow. We have achieved so much already after only one year at 605. The future is very bright and I love working in an environment where the team is passionate and can celebrate our achievements.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “It’s hard to choose. Jim and Kristin Dolan certainly are the easiest choices as Jim hired me way back in 1983 [at Cablevision]. I hadn’t yet graduated from college and I was given the amazing opportunity in ad sales under Jim. We worked very hard and established the foundations of local cable ad sales.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Life will bring you many twists and turns that you can never plan for, so surround yourself with good people who have your best interests in mind. Look for those good mentors: they will change your life.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “What downtime? My waking hours are spent on 605, two almost-adult children, an aging father, my life partner Stephen Densen, as well as many beloved friends. I enjoy going to the gym and regenerating with nature by biking or hiking. Stephen is a foot surgeon and we enjoy being involved in the Doctors Without Borders events in the town of Southampton, L.I., where we have a home.”


ROBYN POLASHUK
Partner, Covington & Burling LLP

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Robyn Polashuk focuses her practice at Covington & Burling on the licensing and distribution of programming content across a variety of platforms (including cable and satellite, IPTV, mobile and internet) and business models (from linear to subscription and transactional VOD, electronic sell-through and interactive applications). Her work also includes negotiating retransmission-consent agreements. Clients have included The Walt Disney Co. and ABC, El Rey Network, Fox Cable Networks, Hulu, Ovation, NFL Network, PBS, Pluto TV, Tennis Channel, TV One, Univision and Viacom. She’s negotiated on behalf of content providers with all the traditional TV distributors, including AT&T-DirecTV, Charter, Comcast, Dish Network, Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS, as well as the emerging streaming distributors, such as PlayStation Vue, Sling TV and Verizon Go90. Earlier in her career, she served as VP, distribution legal affairs, at Lifetime, and as senior counsel, new technology law group, at Disney.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “I love the diversity of the clients and projects, and the interesting new issues I am asked to address nearly every day in our evolving industry.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “My greatest mentors have been colleagues who I’ve met later in my career and have pushed me to think about my role in new ways. Every person we know has things to teach us if we are open to the lesson.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Law school teaches us that hard work is how we provide value. But it is our relationships, earned trust and integrity that are our greatest assets. Grow your relationships and support those around you with quality — that is how we can offer the most value to the industry and ourselves.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “Turns out that I have a bit of a green thumb, so when I have a free hour or two, I enjoy roaming plant nurseries for a specimen not yet in my garden.”


SAMANTHA ROSE
VP Director, Video Investment, Horizon Media

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Samantha Rose is a leader at Horizon Media, overseeing national video buying for clients such as Capital One, Sleep Number, A+E Networks, Publishers Clearing House and Stanley Steemer. An 11-year veteran, she previously worked on accounts spanning multiple verticals, including Geico, HGTV and David’s Bridal. Currently, she is responsible for overseeing both upfront and scatter negotiations for her client roster. Rose also spearheads the Horizon Advanced group, which seeks to address and highlight best practices for enabling and infusing data into video activations. She works to identify best practices for the future of data-infused TV activation and vets the value of nontraditional prospective partners with programmatic or addressable TV solutions.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “The community and diversity of personalities make it so that I am excited to come into work every day. I’m consistently overwhelmed by how clever and engaged my colleagues are.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “Dave Campanelli, who I have worked for my entire career, is unbelievably smart but has also demonstrated the unique skill of how to tell a clear and concise story surrounding the most complicated of areas. And Marianne Gambelli, who epitomizes what it means to be a strong leader.”

CAREER ADVICE: “It’s all a balancing act — of course, personal and professional life balance, but also being able to balance what you know and don’t know, and actually listening to others and retaining that information.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “I have two young children so most of my ‘downtime’ is spent enjoying them and marveling at everything they do! But I also love to cook, travel and read fiction.”


MICHELLE STRONG
Senior Vice President, Distribution, A+E Networks

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Michelle Strong co-leads the distribution sales team at A+E Networks. Her career includes four years in distribution with Disney and ESPN Media Networks, six years with BET in affiliate sales and marketing and four years with Comcast in local ad sales.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “I am truly living my dream by working in television. Content Distribution is such a crucial part of the ecosystem and I’m excited to see how the work we do reaches so many people. Those who know me know that I am a passionate champion of diversity and I get tremendous satisfaction from co-leading, with Marcela Tabares, the Multicultural Insights team at A+E Networks. The work we do to impact our business is extremely rewarding.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “My parents provided a great foundation. Professionally, I’ve been lucky to seek advice from some of the best in the business, starting with my current boss, David Zagin, along with my former bosses, Lori Conkling, Justin Connolly and Jane Rice. I’m extremely fortunate to be a part of the A+E Networks Executive Women’s Forum led by Abbe Raven. To be personally mentored by Abbe has been a gift.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Nancy Dubuc has created an inclusive culture at A+E Networks where there is value in being yourself. Throughout my career, I’d see successful people in certain roles and at times felt that unless I led like them I wouldn’t be a fit for that role or obtain their level of success. Somewhere down the road I realized that I was enough. There is such freedom in being yourself. So I’d say, find ways to ‘be you!’ ”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “I enjoy being a mom to very active twin daughters, traveling with my husband and threatening to learn to play the guitar.”


MICHELE THORNTON GHEE
Senior Vice President Media Sales, BET Networks/BET Her, A Viacom Company

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Michele Thornton Ghee, who joined what was then Centric TV in 2012, was instrumental in branding it as “The First Network Designed for Black Women” and then into BET Her. Her team is charged with growing the network’s revenue base. Thornton Ghee has worked for CNN, A&E, History and The Weather Channel. She began her career at SBC Communications (Pacific Bell) in Oakland, Calif. She has written two books: Stratechic: Life and Career Winning Strategies for Women and Stratechic 2.0: Her Plan, Her Power, Her Purpose.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “What I love is that it’s not a job but a movement. I get to fight for black women every day of the week; 24 hours a day.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “I’ve had two mentors in my life and 100 advocates. The mentors have been a huge influence but so have my advocates. We live in a time where everyone is busy and it’s difficult for people to commit to the time necessary to build a mentee-mentor relationship. Advocacy has opened doors for me, helped me get promoted, paved the way to write and self-publish a book — you get the picture. I’ve learned not to wait on mentors but built an incredible circle of advocates.”

CAREER ADVICE: “If women build a plan and take the time to execute it then we have an opportunity to walk in our destiny. So what’s my career advice? I don’t have any. I have life advice. Get time back from people and things that aren’t worthy; activate your self-awareness; don’t attend events without a plan or purpose; know that follow-up and preparation are the most important aspects of building relationships; ask for what you’ve earned and know your brand better than the brand you work for! Do these things and you will have the career that leaves a legacy.”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “Other than spending time with my husband and kids — I’m still figuring that one out!”


JULIE UNRUH
Group Vice President, Programming Financial Operations & Analytics, Charter Communications

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Julie Unruh, who joined Charter in 2004, oversees the Programming Financial Operations, Data Analytics and Contract Management & Compliance groups. She is responsible for providing financial and analytical insights inform content acquisition decisions, including original content. She previously served as VP of Revenue Assurance, a business unit she was hired to build. Prior to joining Charter, she was a manager in the PwC advisory practice, delivering revenue assurance solutions to cable industry clients.

LIKES MOST ABOUT HER JOB: “I love that every day is a new challenge and provides me an opportunity to learn and grow alongside some really talented people. I enjoy providing financial and analytical insights for video strategy decisions and working to better understand the value of programming.”

MAJOR MENTORS: “I have been influenced by many great mentors throughout life. In my early years, it was my parents and sisters who taught me values, work ethic and to dream big. Growing up, I played sports and experienced lessons in teamwork, success, adversity and leadership from great coaches and teammates. In my professional career, I have been fortunate to work with and learn from some dynamic leaders that have challenged me to grow. In life, I am lucky to have amazing supporters that have encouraged and pushed me.”

CAREER ADVICE: “Surround yourself with talented people who are passionate about what they do and inspire others to follow — it’s contagious!”

ENJOYS DURING DOWNTIME: “I enjoy spending time with my family. My husband and I have two sons that keep us on the go. On weekends, it is a pretty safe bet that you can find us at a soccer field. When we have a chance to escape, we enjoy trips to the mountains and beach.”

Twitter has released research showing that it can help marketers better reach viewers when they’re watching live events, particularly sports, on TV.

Data from comScore showed Twitter is the only social network that gets a lift in unique visitors when sports is on the air, Twitter said. During the 2017 Super Bowl, for example, Twitter usage was 19% higher than average while the other social platforms combined were down.

Related: Four Trends in Play for Cable Sports

Twitter commissioned a study from Neuro-Insight, which uses biometrics to gauge the impact the social platform has on sports fans; the company came up with three main findings.

The first is that Twitter makes live sports events more engaging and memorable. When Twitter was used as a second screen to see what others are saying in real time, engagement was up 31% and memorability was up 35% compared with engagement and memorability among fans using TV alone. When a sports event was streamed on Twitter, engagement rose 60% and memorability 59% compared with TV-only viewing.

The second is that when the sports event is more engaging, the advertising in it works harder. Engagement with Twitter ads were up 42% during games on TV, and memorability rose 52%.

Finally, TV ads were also more effective when viewers were also using Twitter during sportscasts. Engagement with TV ads was up 18% and memorability rose 13%.

Related: CES 2018: As World Turns Digital, TV Ads Remain Powerful

“Through our past work, we know that generally the presence of the second screen, specifically with Twitter, helps TV, and we saw a similar effect for live events in this study,” said Pranav Yadav, CEO of Neuro-Insight US. “This means that by having Twitter as a part of the marketing mix, brands can not only reach a bigger audience, they’re actually giving a boost to their original investment in TV. It’s a win-win.”

The TV industry’s efforts to adapt to new consumer habits have evolved for many years. Yet much remains to be done right now, particularly in the areas of measurement, designing consumer friendly products and building technical infrastructures for the digital age.

Progress in those areas will be particularly important in 2018, given the signs that the basic glue holding together the pay TV industry is melting, with subscriber losses accelerating and more programmers launching their own over-the-top services outside the multichannel ecosystem.

Viewer Watch 2018:‘New Media?’ No Longer| Why TV’s Golden Age Isn’t a Gilded One|The Viewer Watch 2018 Charts

Underlying this transformation is new technology for operations. “We are very focused on the idea that we have to make our content available literally anytime and anyplace,” Diane Tryneski, HBO executive vice president, technology, and chief digital officer, technology, said. “That is a real change and the tech that supports that has to be very different than it used to be.”

To do that, HBO has embraced cloud and internet protocol technologies and adopted workflows that allow the programmer to quickly respond to new business opportunities. “The fact that we aren’t siloed means that we are seamlessly delivering content to anywhere, whether it’s TV everywhere, HBO Go or one of our affiliates’ platforms,” she said.

Discovery Communications senior vice president of technology strategy and architect Brinton Miller said he sees the same advantages and prospects. “Discovery has been very focused on getting our content on every screen and every platform, from [multichannel video programming distributors] to social or whatever the next big thing that comes around will be and we have been executing on that strategy in the last few years,” he said. “That has meant a big shift in the way we approach infrastructure, so that we can react quickly to this quickly changing landscape.”

It’s Hard to Make Things Easier
Achieving those goals isn’t easy, given the scale and complexity of major programmers’ operations.

Discovery, for example, has more than 420 linear networks and publishes to more than 380 different nonlinear platforms. Each year, the company takes in about 3,000 hours of new content that must be versioned for 220 countries around the world.

Read More:Download the Complete Viewer Watch 2018 Report

To simplify those operations, Discovery has already completed its “On Ramp” project, which allows it to get content from producers and process it in the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company has also moved all of its U.S. linear networks to native cloud infrastructure with AWS.

Notable progress can also be found at pay TV operators. During a lengthy interview, Phil McKinney, president and CEO of CableLabs, ticked off a long list of initiatives helping the cable industry transform their infrastructures.

These range from the transition to IP and cloud-based technologies, which are allowing operators such as Comcast to launch next-generation interfaces on the X1 platform, to the close alliances CableLabs is setting up with consumer electronics companies and Silicon Valley firms that are bringing new technologies into the industry.

One particularly important area is increased bandwidth to enable a host of new services. “Improved broadband is a critical foundation for the future of our business,” said Heather McCallion, vice president of programming at Atlantic Broadband, which has rolled out 1 Gigabit-per-second service in two markets and is working on DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades.

DOSCIS 3.1 infrastructures will let operators handle broadband speeds of 10 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream, with even more bandwidth in the pipeline. CableLabs, for example, has developed technologies that use coherent optics to dramatically speed up existing hybrid fiber coaxial networks with no need to lay down new fiber or dig up old infrastructure.

Counting on Measured Progress
Another major issue is measurement. “The industry has to get to the point where it has reliable syndicated cross-platform measurement, but at the moment we still don’t have it,” Turner chief resource officer Howard Shimmel noted.

Cary Meyers, senior vice president of fan and media intelligence at ESPN, highlighted the importance of better measurement by citing recently released data from the first seven weeks of the Nielsen Total Live Audience service.

Read More: Viewer Watch 2016-2018

Between Sept. 25 and Nov. 12, the addition of out-of-home and streaming viewing to traditional viewing numbers meant that ESPN’s ratings were up among millennials aged 18-34 by 28% in primetime over ESPN’s traditional viewing. “We can now see that the millennials that have been missing from [traditional] ratings are in fact viewing our programming in large numbers,” Meyers said.

Overall, the new data from millennials — who account for 46% of the streaming of ESPN programming — boosted ratings for college football by 16% and for Monday Night Football by 13%.

A number of other major programmers have also made great strides in cobbling together a more complete picture of total viewing across platforms.

For example, Shimmel noted, Turner has ramped up its big data capabilities and analytics by combining its own digital consumption data with more traditional measuremements to document cross-platform viewing. Turner recently signed up for Nielsen’s new SVOD ratings and has also been working with 21st Century Fox and Viacom to form Open AP to help standardize the definition. But Shimmel said he was still frustrated by the lack of industry progress toward objective third-party syndicated ratings. “We have to make it easier for advertisers,” he said.

One issue has centered on Nielsen’s SDKs, which are required for the new measurement systems to work. “These SDKs are difficult to implement and you are missing a bunch of networks that haven’t turned them on,” said Jane Clarke, CEO and managing director, Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM).

Sara Erichson, executive vice president of client solutions and audience insights at Nielsen, disagreed, noting that “SDK implementation has improved substantially over the past year. … There is a lot of implementation and trialing of products going on behind the scenes.”

Other promising developments include work on new standards. In the fall of 2017, the Media Rating Council issued standards for digital measurement and in 2018 they will be tackling the larger issue of creating a standard for cross-platform measurement, noted George Ivie, executive director and CEO at the MRC.

“There are a lot of big issues to be solved, but we are doing a ton of heavy lifting and I think there is hope,” Ivie said. “We are making progress.”

Confusion Still Reigns
Improving the consumer experience is another major area of focus for many companies. Todd Supplee, a partner with PwC’s Entertainment & Media practice, noted that rapid proliferation of choice and high quality TV programming is making it harder for consumers to find the content they want.

“There is a lot of confusion among consumers,” he said. The recent PwC Content Discovery survey, for example, found that 62% of respondents complained of struggling to find something to watch and that consumer frustration with the way they access programming is actually higher among streaming-only consumers, with pay TV subscribers reporting less annoyance.

Many companies hope to attract subs by solving these problems. “We see a real opportunity in the idea of bringing all this [OTT and pay TV] content together and making it easier for consumers,” Daniel Spinosa, vice president of entertainment services at Comcast Cable, said.

Spinosa argues that the improved interface of their X1 platform has helped boost VOD consumption by 30% year-over-year and that it has allowed them to build a successful electronic sell-through business.

Atlantic Broadband’s next-generation TiVo platform has also paid off in subscriber retention, Heather McCallion, the operator’s vice president of programming, said. After purchasing a system in Connecticut that had been losing video customers for years, the new TiVo platform and bundling strategy quickly turned things around. “For the first time in that market in many years we actually grew subscribers,” she said.

“Usability is a major driver in everyone’s future success,” added Howard Horowitz, president and founder, Horowitz Research, who also stressed the importance of building programming packages that appeal to consumers at different stages of their life.

Comcast’s Spinosa agreed. As part of an effort to attract younger consumers, the MSO launched Xfinity on Campus and then Internet Plus, which is now turning into Instant TV. “It gives them an entry point to the ecosystem that gives them the content they love,” he said. “But it also allows them to buy up into other elements, getting premium networks, Netflix and ultimately buying into bigger and bigger platforms as they migrate from young millennial to having a family.”

Interfacing With Consumers
Finding the sweet spot with improved interfaces and better program offerings is also key to the increasingly competitive virtual MVPD space. “There are a lot of these other services that are just creating and replicating the model you saw in traditional pay TV on a different delivery mechanism,” Jimshade Chaudhari, vice president of product marketing and management at Sling TV, said. “We are offering a la carte packages that are as granular as you can get in our industry so they can pick and choose the channels and genres that are most important to them.”

Sling has also worked to improve navigation, with a universal search engine that includes both the live content from the over-the-air broadcast networks and on-demand content.

Richard Irving, vice president of product at Hulu, also stressed the importance of the user experience. “Our goal is to create a decidedly unique experience and a deeply personal one,” he said, with a better interface, better search and personalization\ and voice recognition.

FuboTV has worked to differentiate its offerings by focusing on sports and Spanish-language content, head of content acquisition and strategy Ben Grad noted, though it does offer a wide array of other programming.

Last September, the young service hit 100,000 subscribers, with more to come, and Grad said he likes where things are headed.

“One of the biggest things impacting the consumption of video is just the fragmentation and diffusion of viewership,” he said, making the pay TV bundle less valuable — and boosting the popularity of services such as FuboTV.

Multichannel News began publishing its annual Viewer Watch Special Report in 2006 with an eye toward seeing how the changing use of video was transforming the TV business. It is extraordinary what has happened in the ensuing years to digital media, which was long referred to by executives as “emerging” and “new media.”

Early on, they debated some issues that now seem quaint. Should cable networks put their content online? Was it wise to sell their content to Netflix? Why would anyone watch video of dubious quality streamed over the internet when they could view it on a beautiful, large TV in this emerging video standard called high-definition?

Viewer Watch 2018: Why TV’s Golden Age Isn’t a Gilded One

Often the discussion veered into apocalyptic terrain. Will Google Fiber wreck the pay TV sector? How fast will cord-cutting destroy the cable industry? Or, alternatively, just how quickly will young people return to the pay TV fold as they get older and presumably wiser?

Over time, discussions of the power — or poverty — of new media have thankfully disappeared. In transcribed interviews with 22 TV executives and researchers for this 2018 report, the phrase “new media” appears not at all — and for good reason. Heading into the New Year, Magna Global was predicting that the digital media ad spend would exceed TV advertising revenues by more than $30 billion in 2018 and that it would hit $105 billion in 2019, slightly more than the $101 billion PwC is predicting consumers will spend on pay TV subscriptions.

Viewer Watch 2018: Putting Consumers First With Digital

And those trends make many of the central business and economic issues that have long been the obsession of this report more relevant than ever. If new media has passed into a mature media, the old questions of how to make money from video content or craft consumer-pleasing products are now central.

Given the difficulties many face in turning those old problems into newfound profits, we hope that this report will once again help readers understand the major trends that will impact their businesses in 2018 and beyond.

Viewer Watch 2018 | The Charts

As usual, we are indebted to many people who helped with this report. In addition to the executives at pay TV operators, networks, OTT players and research firms who generously gave of their time, many research companies also contributed their insights and data. Among those, we’d particularly like to thank Frank N. Magid Associates, Horowitz Research, Magna Global, PwC, Nielsen and SNL Kagan for sharing their data with us.

To download the full Viewer Watch report, please click here.

Contributing writer George Winslow compiled the data, conducted the interviews and wrote the articles for this report.

comScore said it is creating a cross-platform addressable measurement system, working with Dish Network, that will combine impressions from the Sling TV over-the-top service with those from Dish’s satellite set-top boxes.

The service gives Sling TV advertisers a view of campaigns across the connected TV, mobile and desktop, as well as linear TV impressions on Dish.

Dish Media Sales has been offering addressable advertising since 2012.

Related: Addressable, Programmatic Ads Drive Sling Sales

"Bringing Sling TV's impressions into the measurement fold gives advertisers an apples-to-apples view of their campaign across platform, device and even alongside traditional TV," Adam Lowy, head of Sling TV advertising sales, said in a statement. "We've partnered with comScore to offer advertisers a single, trusted metric to validate their campaigns and bridge these targeted, addressable TV impressions, regardless of where they run."

comScore's linear TV addressable advertising measurement has been used by major agencies and brands for more than five years. This new offering will operate similarly, but extends measurement of addressable campaign delivery to multiple platforms.

With a new president generating a lot of attention, news viewing rose 6% in 2017, according to an analysis of Nielsen figures by analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group.

Sports viewing declined 12% in a year without the Olympics. Removing the Olympics from the equation, sports viewing was still down 6%, Wieser said in a report Wednesday (Jan. 3).

News and sports are key categories for TV, accounting for about 23% of all viewing, based on live-plus-same-day metrics. Those two categories are mostly viewed live, as opposed to entertainment programming, which is increasingly viewed on a delayed basis or on demand.

“News is important for media owners because of the absolute scale of the genre, its potential for profitability, the political influence that follows from these divisions and because of the significant growth they have recorded in recent periods,” Wieser said.

Related: New Year, New Trump Attacks on Media

In the news segment, Weiser said NBCU’s MSNBC was the biggest beneficiary of the surge in news viewing, gaining 49%. Fox News Channel viewership grew 8%, and CNN rose 4%. Overall, viewing of the three big cable news networks was up 15%.

The big three broadcast networks’ news programming was down 7%.

Among individual shows, ABC’s Good Morning America was most popular, but was down 12% year over year. The second most popular news show was Fox News’s Fox & Friends, which was up 25%.

"In contrast to news, sports has struggled generally, although the genre still remains an important source of viewing of traditional TV," Wieser said. "In aggregate, it represents an outsized source of costs, revenues and strategic leverage between networks and distributors."

Disney networks, including ESPN, accounted for 33% of all sports viewing; nonetheless, sports viewing on Disney-owned nets was down 8% despite a 1% increase in programming hours.

Related: Return to New Year’s Day Boosts ESPN's Bowl Games

NBCU properties accounted for 16% of sports viewing and were down 39% because of the absence of Olympic programming. Viewing was down 11% on average in non-Olympic weeks on NBCU networks.

Fox-owned networks had a 21% share of sports viewing, and average viewership was up 13%, thanks in part to the Super Bowl.

Football accounted for 42% of sports viewing, with NFL programming generating 27% of total consumption. NFL viewing was down 8% despite 9% more programming hours. College football programming accounted for 12% of consumption and was flat year to year.

With the college football playoff semifinals returning to New Year’s Day, ratings on ESPN jumped from last year when the games aired on New Year’s Eve.

ESPN said 26.8 million people watched the 2018 Rose Bowl Monday as Georgia beat Oklahoma 54-48 in overtime; with an audience up 39% from last year's Rose Bowl, the game was the fifth most watched cable telecast of all time.

Related: Georgia-Oklahoma Rose Bowl Telecast Scores on Social Media

The Georgia-Oklahoma game trailed only the 2015 Championship game between Oregon and Ohio State, the 2011 Championship game between Oregon and Auburn, and the two semi-final games in 2015, the last time the games were played on New Year’s Day.

Monday’s other semifinal, the 2018 Sugar Bowl with Alabama beating Clemson 24-6, drew 21.1 million viewers, up 10% from the comparable game last year.

Related: Four Trends in Play for Cable Sports

ESPN aired a total of six bowl games on Monday and said they averaged nearly 15 million viewers. The network anticipates the games will comprise the most-watched "New Year’s Eve Six" ever once the streaming audience is fully reported.

The currently available metrics show viewership up 9% from last year and up 24% from the 2015 season.

More than 100 of the top executives in the TV advertising, media buying and marketing industries gathered in New York Tuesday morning (Nov. 28) to tackle issues around audience measurement and advertising effectiveness.

The meeting was arranged by Linda Yacccarino, chair of advertising sales and client partnerships at NBCUniversal.

The TV business has been facing issues involving viewers shifting to non-commercial programming on streaming and on-demand services like Netflix. It has also been struggling to measure viewership as more people watch on their own time and different digital devices. And they are challenge by digital competitors that promise data that does a better job of showing who they reach and how much reaction and sales they generate.

“We have a problem,” said Yaccarino, addressing the group. “We hear it every day. We hear it over drinks with our agency friends and clients. And we hear it from consumers. We hear it from their behavior. Things have got to change.”

She added that things have to change now. “Everyone in this room can decide together what that change looks like,” she said. “We all know the stakes have never been higher.”

Yaccarino said it was important that the industry works together to “build the metrics that our industry needs so we have a fair, equal and transparent market that holds all platforms to the same collective standard.”

She challenge to people in the group to contribute suggestions about what their companies could do to fix the industry’s problems.

She told the audience what NBCU would do.

“We’re committed to making television smarter. “That means improving the consumer experience making marketing more effective. We are weaning ourselves off a single currency metric and moving more to real business objectives,” she said.

“We might even lower commercial loads across the board,” Yaccarino added.

The number of ad impressions in video-on-demand programming from cable operators working with Canoe jumped again in the third quarter.

Ads served in VOD programming generated 5.668 billion impressions in the third quarter, up 48% from 3.812 billion a year ago, the company said. Canoe serves 36 million households that subscribe to Charter, Comcast and Cox.

Canoe ran a total of 3,208 campaigns in the quarter, up 51% from 2,123 a year ago.

Related: Canoe Marks 100 Billion Spots Inserted in VOD Programming

VOD ads are becoming increasingly popular as viewing increases and as more networks enable dyanmic ad insertion technology, which allows advertisers to better target their commercials. Last year's totals were impacted by the election, which soaked up viewer attention.

About 24% of the Q3 campaigns were network tune-in campaigns. The others were for clients in a wide range of categories. The breakdown was similar last year.

So far this year, Canoe’s ads have generated 17.9 billion impressions, up from 12.8 billion at this point a year ago.

Related: Set-Top VOD Ads Must Evolve to Survive

Canoe said that 99% of the time consumers watch mid-roll ads to completion. In pre-roll the completion rate is 99.18% and it is 91.35% in post-roll breaks.

The bulk of Canoe’s ad impressions are created by mid-roll ads, which generated 4.684 billion impressions, compared with 896.7 million pre-roll impressions and 87.2 million post-roll impressions. 

Read more at broadcasatingcable.com.

When your most popular new show is called Live PD, you wouldn’t think there would be many viewers tuning in on a delayed basis or watching reruns.

But A&E has found that its unscripted series can be arresting, whether viewed live or not.

Seeking to reverse long-term ratings decline, earlier this year, A&E, part of A+E Networks, shifted its programming strategy, eschewing scripted dramas like Bates Motel and Longmire and sticking to unscripted and nonfiction programming.

Related: The Unscripted TV Issue >Reality TV’s Got Game

The move came at a time when more and more networks — not to mention streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video and even digital companies like Facebook, YouTube and Apple — are ramping up their original programming efforts.

Much of the ensuing stampede of original programming has been scripted dramas, leading to questions as to whether the current era of peak TV has really met a peak.

Related: A&E Sets ‘Undercover High’ Documentary Series

“We seem to be bucking the trend,” said Elaine Frontain Bryant, who was named executive vice president and head of programming for A&E earlier this year. “We’re doubling down and just doing nonfiction with A&E, within our part of the AETN network. It’s working for us. And we’ve been climbing in the rankers ever since.”

MCN Original Video: One-on-One in 2 With A&E's Elaine Frontain Bryant

More Time on the Beat
Driving A&E ratings resurgence is the real-life police series Live PD. Live PD now airs live as it happens on A&E for six hour a week.

Related: A&E’s ‘Live PD’ Sets Series Ratings Record

The documentary series was the No. 1 unscripted series in 2017. It returns for season 2 on Oct. 6. A&E recently announced a 100-episode order from producer Big Fish Entertainment.

But A&E is finding that Live PD also draws a surprisingly large audience when it is not live. “Our buzziest shows in live-same-day also are the most successful in the time-shifted way, as well,” Bryant said.

And while scripted shows, with their big-name stars, get the bulk of attention, nonscripted shows attract passionate audiences as well.

“There is a direct correlation because they cut through,” Bryant said. “It’s really about the show. Good shows cut through. It’s not just about scripted.”

“Nonfiction can cut through the way scripted can. And among time-shifted or on-demand shows, 31 of the 50 highest ranked were non-scripted it just shows that that’s what people want to watch too,” she said. “For us, the ones they’re watching live, they’re also taping and watching them later too.”

Related: Finding Viewers ‘Behind Bars’

Since its launch, Live PD has been a phenomenon. Season one averaged 1.6 million total viewers in live-plus-7 viewing. The series hit a high of 2.4 million total viewers on July 15. Viewership increased 136% from launch and the series more than doubled A&E’s ratings in its time period from a year ago.

Hosted by Dan Abrams, with analysis from Tom Morris Jr., Live PD uses dashboard, fixed-rig and handheld cameras to capture the work of urban and rural police forces from around the country on typical Friday and Saturday nights.

“I think with Live PD, it’s new and fresh and exciting every single week, and that’s the draw. You don’t know what’s going to happen around any bend, any corner, and that is what taped shows cannot provide anywhere. And so even if nothing happens, there is the possibility that anything can at any moment,” Bryant said.

A&E launched Live PD with two hours a week. Then it moved it up to three hours. Now A&E’s schedule ls live with Live PD for six hours. The show has turned A&E’s low-rated Friday and Saturday nights into its most viewed evenings.

“We were doing very painful, low-rated repeats,” she said. “It’s been a real shot in the arm for us.”

Plays Well on Replay
But wait there’s more, as they say in the ads.

A&E launched a cut-down show, Live PD: Police Patrol, consisting of the highlights from the live coverage. And people tuned into that.

Airing in primetime Friday nights, it’s A&Es second-best-performing show in total viewers and adults 25 to 54 when Live PD isn’t airing. It’s performance improved 31% from its premiere to its finale.

And despite a six-day delay, nonlinear viewing of Live PD on A&E’s app and website rose 483% to 132,000 adults 25-54. That was something of a surprise. “We didn’t think they would repeat, and they are repeating,” Bryant said. “And that’s exciting. Anecdotally, I could tell you I was in Texas over Easter weekend on a beautiful Saturday. I was like, ‘Hey family, let’s go hide Easter eggs,’ and they were like, ‘No, we’ve got to watch this show.’ And I said that was last night’s episode. It’s a repeat.”

In addition to Live PD, the network has gotten boosts from other nonfiction series including Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, 60 Days In and The Murder of Laci Peterson.

A&E’s ratings have been up for six straight months through August among total viewers. In August, A&E was the No. 5 ad-supported cable network among adults 25-54, No. 6 with adults 18-49 and No. 9 with total viewers.

comScore, which has been trying to put its financial house in order since accounting issues cropped up, said it has formed a special committed to do a long-term strategic review of the company.

The review process is being driven by Starboard Value LP, which owns 4.9% of comScore stock.

Related: ComScore Stock Plunges 30% as Accounting Woes Continue

comScore also said it has delayed reporting its financial results and plans to settle lawsuits against it for $27.2 million in cash, which would come from the company’s insurers, and $82.8 million in stock.

The media measurement company has not released financial statement since its accounting issues emerged. That has resulted in the comScore’s shares being delisted from public exchanges. The company said Monday its efforts to restate its earnings for 2015, 2106 and 2017 in March 2018 at the earliest. The company noted that it is also working on preparing its financial statements from 2017.

Earlier this year, the company said that the cost of the investigation and redoing its financial statements was about $30 million.

Related: comScore Considers Stock — and Strategy

“We regret the need to extend further the date for filing our restated financials and we share the frustration of our stockholders,” said CEO Gian Fulgoni. “However, to ensure the completeness and accuracy of the past four years of financial information we will be reporting and to ensure that we are also able to include audited financial statements for 2017, the Board has determined that additional time is needed. In the meantime, I firmly believe in comScore's future based on the compelling opportunities we see for organic growth within our existing and new products.

The financial irregularities came to light after comScore acquired Rentrak, a move that some saw as having the potential to make the new combined company a challenger to Nielsen, which dominates the media measurement industry.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

As the National Football League gets set to kick off the 2017 season, analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson Research is predicting that ratings will be up in primetime, reversing last year’s surprising declines.

THE SPORTS ISSUE:Engineering a Monday Night Comeback at ESPN: Q&A With Burke Magnus

Nathanson sees NBC’s Sunday Night Football rising 5% in total viewers and ESPN Monday Night Football up 11% based on stronger matchups on their schedules.

Down the road, Nathanson said, there could be a shakeup in NFL rights deals, mainly because the Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN is paying much more -- $1.9 billion per year -- for its Monday Night Football package than Comcast’s NBC pays for Sunday Night Football -- $960 million -- even though the Sunday night generates much higher ratings because it gets better matchups.

The NFL is also giving better matchups to shore up its Thursday Night Football packages on NBC and CBS, diluting MNF, he says. Rights fees for those Thursday games are also cheaper than ESPN’s MNF.

When those deals expire in 2021 and 2022, “Disney would be wise to drop MNF and focus on all their energy and resources on securing the preferable SNF package, which is now nearly $1 billion cheaper and includes three Super Bowls,” Nathanson said. “This would then potentially force NBC into bidding for either the CBS AFC package or the Fox NFC package.”

That bidding would drive up the fees and open the door to new bidders for MNF, including either Turner or a digital player like Facebook, Amazon, Google or Apple.

THE SPORTS ISSUE: Sports Streaming Picks Up the Pace |OTT Players Could Change Television’s Sports Game

The season starts Thursday night (Sept. 7) with the champion New England Patriots taking on the Kansas City Chiefs..

Last season's NFL ratings were down 12% up through Election Day (Nov. 8, 2016). They were down 5% the remainder of the season. Reasons for the declines included increased interest in political news, bad matchups resulting in more blowouts and even quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel in protest during the national anthem.

Despite the ratings drop, ad revenue wasup 3% last year to $.35 billion for the NFL season including the playoffs and Super Bowl, according to research company Standard Media Index.

Nathanson noted that for TV, the NFL represents a big chunk of both ratings and revenue. Last year, NFL game and other football programming — including the Super Bowl -- represented 60% of Fox’s live plus same day P2+ GRPs. It was close to 30% for NBC, ESPN and CBS.

The season, Nathanson said, based on pre-season power rankings of the 25 best matchups, nine are headed for CBS, eight for Fox and seven for NBC. ESPN has only two of the top 25 matchups. CBS also has the largest share of the bottom 25 matchup, he noted.

On Thursday night, the average power ranking of the teams involved has improved. NBC’s schedule shows the biggest improvement. CBS’s power ranking is unchanged and the NFL Networks matchups are weaker than last year.

With all of the major media companies that own TV networks having reported their latest financial results, analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research calculated that national advertising was down about 1% during the second quarter.

While the second-quarter loss was an improvement on the first quarter's 3% decline, “a generally flat to slightly negative advertising environment should persist for the foreseeable future,” Wieser said in a note.

During earnings calls, Wieser said, executives talked about strong pricing in the scatter market, changes in audience measurement and advances in audience targeting as reasons to be optimistic about future ad revenue growth.

Related: Fox Seeing Big Gains in Non-Linear Advertising Sales

But Wieser isn’t buying it. He tackled those arguments in his note, one by one:

“Pricing does not necessarily reflect changes in demand.”
Weiser noted that ad sales execs have more information about their inventory, giving them advantages in negotiations with buyers, who usually want spots in specific shows. Some scatter advertisers pay higher prices for their advertising because they are newer advertisers, automatically resulting in scatter prices that are higher than upfront price.

“Advertisers already know that not all viewing is measured.”
Wieser said a measurement system that increases viewership by 5% won’t be accepted by buyers unless it comes with a 5% discount in price.

“New forms of audience targeting help media owners identify different value for their inventory, but won’t cause most advertisers to change how they budget for the medium, either.”
Large advertisers have TV budgets that probably won’t change, even if more of their TV budgets are spent on more targeted products, Wieser said.

The changes media executives are talking about won’t affect TV, Wieser said. And the large advertisers that dominate TV are mostly losing sales to newer competitors and looking to cut costs. New TV advertisers are not coming along to replace older ones.

“We don’t see many new categories of marketers emerging who drive TV – those who are large, consumer-focused, differentiate themselves on the basis of awareness of attributes, budget on a share-of-voice basis and operate in nationally oriented and oligopolistic sectors,” Wieser said. “Towards these ends, we don’t see a rebound in growth for traditional national TV advertising any time soon.”

Offering some good news to apps and OTT services such as Watch ESPN, Fox Sports Go, Newsy and CNNgo, sports and news were the most-viewed genres for out-of-home viewing, Nielsen found in a study presented at the Television Critic’s Association tour in Los Angeles.

That study, which also factored in TV viewing at bars, gyms and airports, not just apps on mobile devices, found that sports delivered an out-of-home viewing lift of 9%, another 2 hours and 37 minutes on top of the nearly 30-hour average per person (6 years-plus) watching sports. News was next followed by  children’s multi-weekly programming, general dramas, sports commentary, and sit-coms.  

The study also found that nearly 60% of OOH impressions came way of “core buying demographics,” while OOH viewing among people 18-34 contributed an 8% boost from in-home viewership, and 6% when the group was expanded to 18-49.

“While only a portion of the Nielsen Total Audience, OOH viewing is an integral part to clearly viewing the whole media consumption picture,” Nielsen concluded.

Live TV viewing continued to decline in the first quarter, dropping by 10 minutes to 4 hours, 21 minutes per day per person among adults, according to Nielsen's Q1 Total Audience Report.

Usage of apps and the web on smartphones jumped by 20 mlnutes per day, Nielsen said. Viewing of time-shifted TV increased by 1 minute per day to 34 minutes daily.

Related: Facebook Finds Distracted Viewing Among Smartphone Users

Nielsen said the number of pay TV subscribers to cable, telco and satellite services fell 1.4% to 97.8 million household in the first quarter from 99.2 million a year ago.

The number of broadcast-only homes rose to 15.2 million from 13.3 million. The number of broadband-only homes also rose, to 5.3 million from 3.9 million.

The share of homes subscribing to subscription video-on-demand services such as Netflix rose to 57% from 50% a year ago.

Related: Netflix Rises to Top Four in ‘Must Keep TV’ Rankings

 The 2017 BET Awards special rocked social media Sunday, averaging more than 10 million interactions according to Nielsen.

BET’s live telecast of the awards, which recognizes the triumphs and successes of artists, entertainers, and athletes in a variety of categories, generated 10.4 million interactions from 2.9 million unique Twitter and Facebook accounts, according to Nielsen's Daily Social Content Ratings.

Starz’s fourth season premiere of drama series Power was a distant second with 399,000 interactions, followed by Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return, AMC’s Fear The Walking Dead and ABC’s Celebrity Family Feud.  

MLB Network’s Texas Rangers-New York Yankees telecast was the most social live sports telecast of the day, according to Nielsen.

2017 BET Awards winners are as follows: 

Best Female R&B/Pop Artist

BEYONCÉ

Best Male R&B/Pop Artist

BRUNO MARS

Best Group

MIGOS

Best Collaboration

CHANCE THE RAPPER FT. 2 CHAINZ & LIL WAYNE - NO PROBLEM

MIGOS FT. LIL UZI VERT - BAD AND BOUJEE

Best Male Hip-Hop Artist

KENDRICK LAMAR

Best Female Hip-Hop Artist

REMY MA

Video of the Year

BEYONCÉ - SORRY

BRUNO MARS - 24K MAGIC

Video Director of the Year

KAHLIL JOSEPH & BEYONCÉ KNOWLES-CARTER - BEYONCÉ “SORRY”

Best New Artist

CHANCE THE RAPPER

Album of the Year

LEMONADE - BEYONCÉ

Dr. Bobby Jones Best Gospel/Inspirational Award

LECRAE - CAN’T STOP ME NOW (DESTINATION)

Best Actress

TARAJI P. HENSON

Best Actor

MAHERSHALA ALI

YoungStars Award

YARA SHAHIDI

Best Movie

HIDDEN FIGURES

Sportswoman of the Year Award

SERENA WILLIAMS

Sportsman of the Year Award

STEPHEN CURRY

Centric Award

SOLANGE - CRANES IN THE SKY

Coca-Cola Viewers’ Choice Awards

BEYONCE - SORRY

Fox Sports has signed up for Nielsen’s National Out-of-Home reporting service, which counts people watching ballgames on TV in bars, hotels and other locations.

The ratings lift a game can get by adding out-of-home viewers can be significant. Nielsen said Fox NFL regular-season games saw a 16% lift from out-of-home viewing last season.

Fox, ESPN and some other TV companies are negotiating to add out-of-home viewers to the eyeballs they sell to advertisers in the current upfront market. ESPN was the first to subscribe to the Nielsen out-out-of-home reporting service when it launched in April.

Related: Nielsen Launches Out-of-Home TV Ratings Service

The multi-year agreement covers Fox Sports on broadcast, FS1, FS2 and Fox Deportes with program and commercial ratings ranging from live to live plus 7 days of delayed viewing.

“Sports are being watched everywhere, every day and on every type of screen. Our business has to keep pace with changes in viewer behavior,” said Eric Shanks, president, chief operating officer and executive producer, Fox Sports.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.