Nielsen said its local television ratings combining big data from set-top boxes and smart TVs with viewer panels will become its local ratings currency in all markets starting in January.

“Clients will be able to start using Big Data + Panel in Local for transactions from January 2 forward,” Nielsen said in a letter to customers. “Based on industry feedback and feasibility, this will be a currency changeover without a parallel transaction period.”

With increasing fragmentation and the shift to streaming, small panel sizes have made it difficult for local stations and cable operators, competing with digital advertising, to offer detailed and granular information on viewers.

While Nielsen is facing challenges in national audience measurement from new rivals that base their viewership information on big data, the local market has been more fraught.

Some broadcasters, like E.W. Scripps, now rely exclusively on data from Nielsen rival Comscore for local ratings. (Scripps uses Nielsen for its national networks.)

In its letter to clients, Nielsen said its customers will be permitted to use Big Data + Panel in Local for transactions. 

Nielsen’s Panel-Only NLTV data stream will be available only for research and analysis.

“We understand that a currency change can cause disruption in the media buying and selling process,“ Nielsen said. “To ensure you have ample time and information to prepare for the currency change in Local, Big Data + Panel impact data is now available for planning and audience estimates to support Q1 2025 negotiations effective immediately. Nielsen’s guidance for post-buy analyses for Q3 and Q4 2024 will remain Panel-Only data, as utilizing consistent methodologies for buy and post-buy analyses is critical for buyers and sellers. 

Criticism of Nielsen intensified during the pandemic when COVID-19 prevented Nielsen staffers from visiting homes to maintain the quality of its viewer panel. As a result, fewer homes were in-tab, or producing usable data.

Nielsen’s accreditation from the Media Rating Council was suspended, meaning the agency had questions about Nielsen's methodology and its ability to provide reliable data.

Nielsen regained the accreditation for its old national ratings system based on its panel of about 40,000 metered homes. Nielsen’s system for adding big data to its panel data is being reviewed by the MRC. Its panel-based local ratings system has not regained its accreditation.

In March, Comscore’s system for measuring national and local household-level TV viewing was accredited by the MRC.

Giant media buyer Publicis is telling network sales executives that it does not think Nielsen’s new panel-plus-big-data currency is ready for this upfront.

Publicis will stick with Nielsen, using the measurement company’s traditional panel-based ratings. The media buyer is eager to use Nielsen’s big data product when it meets its standards, according to people involved in preliminary upfront discussions.

Publicis declined to comment for this story.

Nielsen has acknowledged that it needs to improve on its panel-based ratings system, which has dominated the TV audience measurement business for decades.

The upstart companies challenging Nielsen are basing their audience estimates on big data from set-top boxes and smart TVs. They say big data from millions of households is better for measuring today’s fragmented viewing universe than a panel of just 40,000 homes. Big data is also required for the way marketers now target specific audiences with their TV advertising.

Nielsen has been working on a new ratings stream that uses big data, with its panel serving as a “truth set” that enables it to create person-level data and adjust for errors, biases and other imperfections in the big data sets it works with.

Last month, Nielsen announced that it would make its panel-plus-big-data measurement product available for use as its preferred currency for transacting advertising deals effective in September, when upfront deals cut this spring and summer will take effect. Nielsen will also continue to produce its panel-only ratings, and customers can use that as currency if they want.

"We've worked through the lengthy audit and accreditation process, and are confident that we will answer the outstanding questions," a Nielsen spokesperson said. "We understand that bringing major product enhancements to the marketplace requires our clients to adapt and embrace change."  

Publicis has been a key player in testing Nielsen’s new methodologies along with the Walt Disney Co. 

One of Publicis’ concerns is that it has less than a year of what Nielsen calls “impact data,” a sample of  what the new ratings would look like if they were in effect this TV season. Publicis does not believe it has a sufficient amount of historical data to be able to make projections about how many people will see the commercials it plans to buy.

It’s not good business to invest billions of dollars in commercials without reliable projections, media buying sources noted.

The Nielsen impact data also has not been stable, with big fluctuations. And while some of the changes resulting from a change in methodology seem to make sense, it also includes anomalies that defy explanation–another sign the data is not ready for prime time.

On top of that, a lot of the data generated covers the period when the Writers Guild of America and actors union SAG-AFTRA were on strike, eliminating most of the original programming on linear networks and boosting streaming. That also makes it hard to project when the broadcast networks will start their fall schedules.

The big-data products from other measurement companies are similarly not ready for this upfront, in Publicis’s view. That's why the media agency will continue to use the Nielsen panel data many in the industry call outdated as its currency for transactions.

Publicis is hardly the only client with concerns about Nielsen’s big data methodology. Nielsen had planned to roll out its big data a year ago, but admitted it wasn’t fully baked.

After the pandemic cut the number of people participating in its panel, Nielsen lost Media Rating Council accreditation for its panel-based national measurement system. It regained the accreditation for its panel-based ratings, but there have been delays in getting approval for adding big data. 

Nielsen decided to make its panel-plus-big data rating available without MRC accreditation.

At the same time, Nielsen competitors VideoAmp, Comscore and  iSpot received various levels of certification from the buyers and sellers participating in the U.S. Joint Industry Council on Measurement. Nielsen has declined to work with the JIC.

In March, Comscore received MRC accreditation for measuring household-level viewing. 

Using data from 45 million households and 75 million Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku, Vizio and Comcast devices, Nielsen’s panel-plus-big-data measurement produces audience estimates that are 4% to 5% higher than employing panels alone. Ratings for most shows are up slightly or flat, Nielsen said.

But for some networks, like Spanish-language giant TelevisaUnivision, the gains are much larger. TelevisaUnivision plans to use the new system in the upfront.

Nielsen said it plans to make its combination of panel data plus big-data measurement systems available to use as its preferred currency effective in September, when upfront deals cut this spring take effect.

Nielsen is incorporating big data from Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku, Vizio and Comcast into its new measurement systems. Nielsen is also taking to streamers to incorporate their data into its service.

The big data — from 45 million households and 75 million devices — gets combined with the 40,000 households participating in Nielsen’s panel to create the new ratings. Nielsen uses the panel as a “truth set” that enables it to create person-level data and iron out errors, biases and other imperfections in the big data sets it works with.

At a time when viewing is more fragmented than ever, using big data makes Nielsen’s audience estimates more stable and sensitive, with fewer incidents of programs or demographic groups showing up with no viewers in the sample — the so-called zero cells, Deirdre Thomas, Nielsen’s chief product officer, said on a conference call with reporters.

“You really need a big data set to understand because there are all the different types of media platforms and devices that we all roam around on,” Thomas said. “But bit data alone cannot get it done. You need a truth set.”

Nielsen also said that using big data increases viewing levels by 4% to 5%, added Pete Doe, Nielsen’s chief research officer. Viewing levels increase more for younger viewers than older ones.

Ratings for most shows are up slightly or flat, Doe said.

Nielsen has dominated the TV ratings business for decades, but throughout that time had been subject to criticism when its numbers haven’t measured up. During the pandemic, Nielsen lost the Media Rating Council’s accreditation for its national and local measurement processes.

Nielsen regained its national accreditation last year, but only for its panel-based data. Its plan to add big data has yet to be accredited by the MRC.

The measurement world has also become more competitive with companies looking to use big data to improve audience estimates.

Last month, Comscore received household-level accreditation from the MRC for its national and local measurement system. 

Nielsen is also facing competition from iSpot.tv and VideoAmp. 

Comscore, iSpot.TV and Videoamp all received provisional certification from the Joint Industry Council on Measurement for their use of big data to produce audience estimates. (Nielsen declined to participate in the JIC process.)

Getting MRC accreditation has historically been a big deal for media buyers and advertisers, but Nielsen appears ready to go forward with its big data even before the MRC has finished its review.

But this upfront, big-data currencies will be used for transactions.

“Big data from any one of four measurement companies (Nielsen, VideoAmp, iSpot, & Comscore) is a given as an upfront currency option,” said Sean Cunningham, CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau, which has been monitoring the measurement and currency situation closely on behalf of its membership of programmers and distributors who sell advertising.

“Three of the above (VideoAmp, iSpot & Comscore) have been through a rigorous JIC data testing process to good result, and Nielsen national data is at the tail end of an MRC audit process, there are also some who may want to trade on Nielsen panel; there are definitely choices,” Cunningham said. 

Nielsen’s big data will enable it to help plan and measure advanced audiences. Nielsen can link data that brands have about their customers to identify target consumers and create cross-platform measurement as well, Thomas said.

The new system will also better enable Nielsen to measure addressable advertising. 

Thomas noted that as part of the process of launching big data as part of its currency, Nielsen has been providing clients with impact data since the end of last year to gauge how the new measurement performs. Nielsen will continue to use C3 and C7 as metrics and continue to provide panel-only data to clients who prefer to use it.

Nielsen today told clients that it will not be using first-party data from Amazon in the ratings used for buying and selling commercials during NFL Thursday Night Football.

Nielsen had a meeting with the Media Rating Council on August 30 about getting accreditation for its plan to integrate Amazon data into its already accredited panel-based rating system.

The MRC had questions about Nielsen’s methodology and it was not accredited.

"Our work with Nielsen on the integration of first party data sources into its national measurements is ongoing.  MRC has not accredited these, and the official status remains “in process," the MRC said in a statement.

While the Amazon data is not included in the panel-based measurement, which Nielsen has designated as its approved product to be used as an ad-buying currency, the Amazon data is being included in Nielsen’s big-data audience stream.

Nielsen had planned for its big-data stream to be currency in this upfront, but reversed course earlier this year. The big-data stream remains unaccredited by the MRC.

Also Read: Nielsen: VAB Complaints About Measuring Amazon’s ‘Thursday Night Football’ Are ‘Misleading and Inaccurate’

The decision means that upfront ad buys based on panel data will be stewarded based on the same data.

“As Nielsen works to modernize media measurement by integrating census-level data sets, including first-party data, we remain committed to adhering to the MRC's measurement standards,” Nielsen said in a statement. “Our aim is to ensure the process with which we introduce new ways of measuring audiences is inclusive of client feedback and held to the highest standards. For now, Nielsen’s panel-only National TV service will remain the currency of record. First-party data will be included in Big Data in National measurement figures, which are available to all customers separately.”

Nielsen will continue to work to incorporate big data — obtained from set-top boxes and smart TVs as well as streaming network servers — into its ratings, the company told clients. It said the integration could be accomplished in as little as two months.

Sean Cunningham, CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau, which represents programmers and distributors, had opposed the inclusion of Amazon data in Nielsen’s TNF ratings.

Including Amazon data would boost its viewership totals, giving it an advantage over the other networks that broadcast NFL football and believe that Nielsen undercounts their audiences. 

“I think everyone wins,” Cunningham said of Nielsen’s decision. 

First-party data helps networks understand how to calibrate the audience shortfall in Nielsen’s data, Cunningham said. 

“The key will all of this is that it’s done in an extremely well-lit manner in which all the details are completely transparent to both buyers and sellers,” he said.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement said it will examine the value of panels in the future of TV and cross-platform television measurement. 

The project will be led by Joan FitzGerald of Data ImpacX and Jonathan Steuer of Anonymous Media Research.

“Consumer research panels have played a critical part of the television measurement ecosystem for decades,” CIMM managing director Jon Watts said. “However, the growing use of different datasets to support measurement, the shift of viewing to connected devices and increasingly sophisticated modeling techniques have led many industry participants to question the value of panels. 

“At the same time, we’re seeing a proliferation of new panels for calibration and other purposes and steady improvements in panel technologies,“ Watts added. ”This project aims to align the industry around a clear understanding and common vision for the future role and value of panels in the U.S. TV market.” 

NIelsen has long based its TV measurement on its panel of sample TV households. Nielsen is working to incorporate big data from millions of set-top boxes and smart TVs into its ratings, but it is being challenged by a number of companies that prioritize big data, including Comscore, iSpot.tv and VideoAmp.

According to CIMM, its new project will enable the industry to better comprehend the different perspectives on panels across publishers, agencies, marketers and providers.

“It seems clear that a single ‘gold standard’ research panel of tens of thousands of households is no longer sufficient for understanding TV viewership or for meeting the requirements for cross-platform video measurement,” FitzGerald said. “In other words, it seems clear that the days of ‘panel-first’ TV measurement are over. Digital platforms and other digital devices enable extremely granular measurement of many aspects of media behavior by collection and analysis of device log files, server log files and ACR software running on media consumption devices. However, such big data sources come with significant limitations.”

The study will look at the limitations to using big data for measuring TV viewing including incomplete coverage and subpar data accuracy.  

“We hope the industry can reach consensus about the need for panels or panel alternatives, as well as minimum requirements and viable product definitions,”  Steuer said. “Ideally, this project will enable the development of such a consensus position and minimum requirements for panels or for alternatives in the U.S. marketplace.”

The Project Steering Group includes: Yee Pang, group director, research & measurement, GroupM; Larry Allen, VP and GM of addressable enablement, Comcast Advertising; Howard Shimmel, president, Janus Strategy and Insights; Helen Katz, executive VP, research, Publicis; and former ESPN research director Artie Bulgrin, who is now a measurement consultant and project lead for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). 

“Panels are a critical resource for advertisers — but requirements and perspectives are shifting, as new approaches gain traction,” Pang said. “With our group’s collective strengths, we believe the CIMM study can play an important role in helping the industry to align around a common understanding of the value of panels and how they fit into a modern and evolving media marketplace.”

Comcast said it signed a multi-year data license renewal with Nielsen that will expand the ratings firm’s access to return-path data about TV usage from millions of cable subscribers’ homes.

Nielsen will increase its use of Comcast data in its Nielsen One measurement system and broaden its use for local-TV measurement in the 94 markets the two companies share.

The agreement does not affect the use of NIelsen ratings by Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit. NBCU has been critical of Nielsen and among the leaders in promoting the use of multiple currencies for buying and selling advertising.

NIelsen, which has dominated the TV ratings business, has been challenged lately by companies looking to use big data from set-top boxes and smart TV to measure audiences.

Nielsen One is designed to incorporate big data as well as the viewing information it gets from its meters in its panel of Nielsen households. But there have been numerous delays in getting Nielsen’s big data products into the marketplace.

Also Read: Nielsen Says Panel-Only Is Its Upfront Currency, But It Will Enable Transactions on Big Data

The new Comcast agreement gives Nielsen more return-path data to use alongside its panel data. Nielsen will now have viewing information coping from set-top boxes, smart TVs and other devices in nearly 45 million households,

The companies expect that Nielsen products using the expanded Comcast data will be introduced into the market by 2024.

“We are delighted to extend our strategic partnership with Comcast allowing us to continue to embrace the power of big data for our services both locally across nearly 100 markets and nationally with addressable measurement," Nielsen CEO of audience measurement Karthik Rao said. "This agreement dually reinforces the importance big data plays in our work and Nielsen’s deep commitment to delivering accurate measurement that helps our clients make informed decisions in an increasingly complex media landscape." 

Comcast also licenses its return-path data to measurement companies including Comscore and VideoAmp.

Last year, Comcast made a deal to use viewing data from Comscore to sell local cable ads. 

“Measurement is one of the foremost, complex and dynamic topics in TV advertising today and in order to continue to move the needle forward on progress and change, we need to work together to address, reconcile and resolve current industry challenges on this front,” Comcast Advertising managing director Marcien Jenckes said. “Our announcement with Nielsen today is the latest proof point and step forward in that journey and we look forward to more continued momentum and innovation in the future.” 

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. ■

Nielsen is defending its use of old-school panels to measure TV viewing as much of the business looks to rely more on big data to create alternatives to the ratings measurement firm that has infuriated and dominated the industry for decades.

Ad Industry Seeks Alternatives After Nielsen Loses Seal of Approval

In an op-ed article on Broadcasting+Cable’s website, Nielsen senior VP, data science, Molly Poppie asserts that the big data sets the industry can use “have very real limitations.” 

Companies like Comscore, for example, which recently switched from using Nielsen Portable People Meter panel to using other big-data sources as its methodology for person-level measurement, will be providing “a less accurate read on who is watching what,” Poppie said.

Comscore is one of a number of measurement companies relying heavily on big data to provide alternatives to Nielsen.

VAB Launches Measurement Task Force; NBCU Signs On

In the piece, Poppie acknowledges that “no panel is perfect, as the past few months have demonstrated.” What happened in the last few months is that Nielsen’s national TV ratings service lost the Media Rating Council’s seal of approval because pandemic-related defects in Nielsen’s panel led the company to undercount viewing.

Nielsen Responds to Challenges With New 'Audience Is Everything' Branding

But while panels have issues, big data is not a magic bullet, she said.

“The majority of data sets out there today are built around billing information or online behavior collection, not demographic profiles. They don’t have the rich details about exactly who the people are on their lists — from age, to income, to race and ethnicity — the way you do with a robust panel. These data sets, because they’re created by machine to machine transfers, also increase the possibility of waste and fraud,” she said.

Big data sets also have a bias towards white, affluent and older individuals, leaving minorities and low-income people underrepresented. 

“To be clear, this is not just a Comscore issue. This is an issue with all the big data sets out there currently,” Poppie said.

Poppie said that Nielsen understands the value of big data and is adding it to its national TV measurement service.

“We know that many industry players are excited about the promise of big data, we are too. But as an industry we need to be honest about what big data can and can’t solve for. And we too understand that the future of media measurement is an approach that combines the reach of big data with the verified personal data of robust panels,” she said.

There’s been a lot of energy and excitement in media circles of late about the future of measurement and the promise of big data. At Nielsen, we’ve long understood the value of big data, in fact just last month we announced additional details around how we are adding it to our national TV measurement service. 

We also know that no panel is perfect, as the past few months have demonstrated. 

But when our teams of data scientists hear some of the big, broad claims about big data coming to save the day and fix all the perceived challenges in the industry, it’s hard not to be skeptical.

That’s because, for all its value and amazing potential, the big data sets that the industry currently has access to have very real limitations. 

A Relevant Recent Example

After losing access to Nielsen’s Portable People Meters, Comscore reported that it will now be using data sets from Experian’s ConsumerView to help them identify individual viewers for measurement purposes. Their announcement was framed in the trade press as an advancement — after all, if big data is the future, any shift in that direction must be a good thing. 

Unfortunately for their customers, and for consumers, that’s not the case. 

There are a handful of third-party identity vendors out there who provide the ability to match data sets based on personally identifiable information and provide demographic characteristics, both directly collected and modeled. 

At Nielsen, we regularly check this data. We do it by directly measuring information from our robust panels to validate how accurate these data sets are by: 1) correctly matching to a household and 2) accurately reporting demographics and characteristics. 

What we typically find should give advertisers pause. 

The majority of data sets out there today are built around billing information or online behavior collection, not demographic profiles. They don’t have the rich details about exactly who the people are on their lists — from age, to income to race and ethnicity — the way you do with a robust panel. These data sets, because they’re created by machine-to-machine transfers, also increase the possibility of waste and fraud. 

Because of that, the level of certainty they can provide around who actually lives in a given household is limited. And they have no ability to say who within a given home is watching a given program at a specific time. 

Even when you triangulate that data with other sources, you’re almost guaranteed to have massive gaps and errors in your estimates. This may be acceptable if the use case is targeting, but this data on its own does not provide the accuracy, objectivity and transparency required to deliver measurement. 

Why It Matters

So what does that mean, practically? Well, it has a few implications. 

In the case of Comscore, a shift away from our Personal People Meters, which actually affix microphones to about 100,000 real-life, verified people and track exactly what they’re watching, to a model that uses billing data to provide guesstimates of who within a dwelling might be watching a given program at a given time, will result in a less-accurate read on who is watching what. 

But the possibly bigger implication is that this shift is going to get the industry further away from capturing a true representation of the country. 

We know that many of these types of data sets do a better job of providing data around households when the people living there own their own home and have been there for a long time. And that stands to reason. The problem with that is that long-time homeowners tend to be more White, more affluent and significantly older than the nation as a whole. By design. these data sets undercount Black and Brown people, lower income people and younger people at a time when all of those segments are growing, not shrinking. 

The same is true of data sets built off of set-top box data, which tends to overcount more affluent consumers who are willing to pay more for cable packages and thus disproportionately excludes lower income consumers who are important targets for many marketers. 

The media industry has, rightly, made accurately representing Black and Brown communities a central priority. At Nielsen, our track record on this going back decades hasn’t been perfect, but today we have the most accurate and advanced view of the nation as it truly is. 

Big data-derived measurement tools that aren’t backed by a representative, validated and audited panel can’t make that claim. Nielsen panels can target many demographics within the U.S. Census with 1% variability, but the big data-focused options out there aren’t even close to that. The industry needs to be open and honest with itself about the challenges that big data presents when it comes to representation.

A Wider Problem

To be clear, this is not just a Comscore issue. This is an issue with all the big data sets out there currently. 

In August of 2020 the Association of National Advertisers, in partnership with the Media Research Council and Sequent Partners, used Nielsen data as a benchmark in a study designed to understand the degree to which the multicultural audiences were being accurately represented in media targeting. The study looked at an aggregated collection of high-quality marketing and media data and sought to understand how accurately it was targeting Black, Brown and Asian audiences. The findings were troubling, but not at all surprising to us. 

The study found that the big data sets the industry relies on weren’t up to the task of accurately targeting these critical communities. In part because the data sets weren’t designed to capture rich data about who these consumers truly are, the way robust panels are, there was rampant misrepresentation and underrepresentation in the data. 

Now contrast that with Nielsen's robust panels, which provide a wealth of directly collected information from real-life people, representative of the entire U.S. population. Who lives in the home? How old are they? What race and ethnicity do they identify as? Who is watching the television at a given point in time? Nielsen's panel answers these questions. 

Again, panels on their own aren’t perfect, but there’s a reason other industries, namely pharmaceuticals, use approaches that are similar to panels in approving drugs. That’s because, when the stakes are high, there’s no substitute for real, verified people.  

We know that many industry players are excited about the promise of big data, we are too. But as an industry we need to be honest about what big data can and can’t solve for. And we too understand that the future of media measurement is an approach that combines the reach of big data with the verified personal data of robust panels.

Facebook took unfriendly fire from both sides of the aisle Tuesday (Sept. 21) in a Senate Judiciary Committee Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on Big Data.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told Facebook witness Steve Satterfield, VP of privacy and public policy, that the company needed to supply a witness to a hearing next week in the Commerce Consumer Protection Subcommittee, saying that was needed to explain the company's "coverup" of its platforms' negative impact on children.

Satterfield would not say yes definitively, but did say the company was discussing the request.

Facebook has been on the hotseat most recently over a Wall Street Journal article saying it had data showing that negative impact, but downplayed it.

Also Read: Sen. Blumenthal: TikTok Needs Hill Grilling on 'Devious Licks'

Blumenthal and Consumer Protection ranking member Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) had written Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month asking if it had conducted research on teens that found "a negative effect on children's and teens' mental health or well-being such as increased suicidal thoughts, heightened anxiety, unhealthy usage patterns, negative self-image, or other indications of lower well-being."

Given the subsequent Wall Street Journal article's revelations, Blumenthal said Facebook's responses to the letter were "misleading and evasive," not to mention "directly contradicted" by the journal article.

"The simple fact of the matter is that Facebook has known for years that Instagram is directly involved in an increase in eating disorders, mental health issues, and suicidal thoughts – especially for teenage girls," Blumenthal said at the hearing. "Despite that horrifying risk, Facebook is now dead set on pushing Instagram to even younger children. Far from being transparent about this danger...Facebook in fact has been blatantly deceptive and disingenuous about it."

Satterfield said he understood the frustration but disputed the characterization. "The safety and well-being of the teens on our platform is a top priority for the company," he said. "We’re going to continue to make it a priority. This was important research. We're proud that we did it. We're going to continue to, you know, study these really important issues."

Asked by Blumenthal why Facebook had concealed the study if it was proud of it, Satterfield said it did not make such information public as "an important way of encouraging free and frank discussion within the company about hard issues."

On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), one of Big Tech's biggest critics, asked Satterfield if teenagers were safe on any of Facebook's platforms, to which Satterfield would only say they were working "really hard" to ensure that. Satterfield also would not commit to not accepting behavioral advertising for products "accessed" by children, telling Hawley that advertising was "very valuable" to Facebook but that it had made changes including limitations on reaching those under 18.

But Satterfield did say that the company had a responsibility to invest the billions of dollars it was investing "to make sure these things don't happen."

Hawley said Facebook had actively and deliberately mislead Congress for years about the impact of its platforms. That was another set of characterizations Satterfield strongly rejected.

Members of the Senate Commerce Committee on both sides of the aisle clearly have concerns about how tech companies will protect privacy as they are enlisted to use Big Data to track population, and virus movements, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the effort to mitigate it. 

Those members fired almost four dozen questions at Interactive Advertising Bureau EVP Dave Grimaldi, all of them about protecting privacy, as the committee tried its hand at a "paper," in this case virtual paper, hearing. 

Related: IAB Tells Hill that Advertising is Critical to Connectivity 

Grimaldi and other witnesses for an April 9 "hearing" on using Big Data to fight the COVID-19 pandemic submitted testimony to the committee--posted on its website, after which the members submitted questions to those witnesses on the website. 

"As governments seek to use new technologies in the fight against COVID-19, it is imperative that privacy rights be protected," Commerce Committee chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told Grimaldi, asking: "Are there specific examples of app-based programs you can recommend to policymakers that are both useful in the fight against COVID-19 and respectful of individual privacy rights?" 

He asked if privacy and the effectiveness of using Big Data tracking was always a tradeoff, or was there a way to have both. 

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Communications Subcommittee, wants Grimaldi to weigh in on the smart phone-based contract tracing and the "extraordinary privacy and other civil liberties concerns" that raises. 

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) took issue with IAB's assertion that its members' location data collection was used in the aggregate, but said recent news articles on tracking stay-at-home patterns suggested that the analysis of that data was based on continuous monitoring of specific individuals. "Clearly, location data is being retained [by IAB] members in a granular and linked manner – and are not retained in an aggregate fashion." 

Related: All the Latest on COVID-19 Impact on Industry

Blumenthal pushed beyond the COVID-19 tracking issue to "social media harvesting," asking for a list of IAB members who "harvest, process, or disclose to third parties information gathered from social media accounts or email inboxes for the purposes of audience segmentation, building profiles, ad targeting, advertising analytics, or other commercial purposes not technically necessary for the provision of a service or product that an individual has requested?" 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked what Grimaldi thought about the government creating a National Infectious Disease Forecasting Center, similar to the National Weather Center, which would provide "the best modeling and forecasting to policy makers and public health professionals before, during, and after a disease outbreak." 

Grimaldi will have about two weeks to respond. 

Dave Grimaldi, EVP of public policy for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), came armed with some sobering statistics on the impact of COVID-19 on the advertising industry for a "virtual" visit to Capitol Hill Thursday (April 9).  

Grimaldi pointed to a recent IAB survey of 400 "buy-side" marketers that found that 70% of buyers have adjusted or "paused" their planned ad spending, with almost a quarter of them (24%) saying that spending is on hold for months to come.   

Grimaldi said spending on digital advertising--IAB represents the majority of online advertising--is down by a third, while ads on traditional media are down 39%. And the impact does not stop with the ad community. "At a time when the need for news and information services is at a record high, the advertising budgets that fund this content are disappearing, thus threatening to deprive Americans of access to crucial cutting-edge research and the most up-to-date data about COVID-19." 

Arguably Grimaldi's top-line message to the Hill during the pandemic is that advertising supports all that crucial content and makes it free or low cost to those for whom price is a factor in maintaining connectivity. "Never before in history has the open flow of data been more critical," he said. Advertising helps keep that flow going and Big Data powers the targeted digital advertising keeps that content mostly free. "Subject to appropriate privacy protections, advertising and data can play a significant role in supporting the fight against the coronavirus," he said. 

Grimaldi was not actually on the Hill, of course, in this age of social distancing. Instead, he was making his case via prepared testimony for a "paper hearing" in the Senate Commerce Committee April 9 on Enlisting Big Data in the Fight Against Coronavirus. 

The witnesses are submitting their written testimony in advance of the hearing and the chairman and ranking member will submit opening statements. Those will then be posted online at the beginning of the "paper hearing" and committee members can send questions for those witnesses by the close of the day.   

Witnesses will then have "96 business hours," or about two weeks, to provide their answers. Then, both questions and answers will be posted on the committee's website.  

Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) is calling on the Trump Administration and tech companies to adhere to data privacy standards as they use Big Tech to help track, and ideally, control, the spread of the coronavirus. 

Related: White House Calls for Mining COVID-19 Data 

She was responding to Google's publication of cell phone location data reports from 131 countries showing how people are following social distancing mandates. 

She acknowledged that the pandemic requires using "every tool in our tool belts" to slow the spread, but does not want those tools abusing people's sensitive information. 

Related: Senate Commerce Schedules COVID-19 Paper Hearing

“The Trump administration and tech companies should set the global standard by adopting data privacy principles around anonymization, use limitations, data security, prohibiting re-identification, and destruction after the pandemic," she said. 

She pointed out that telecoms have restrictions on data sharing, but tech companies like Google and Facebook do not. She said the pandemic underscored the need for federal privacy legislation.

The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a "paper" hearing April 9 on "Enlisting Big Data in the Fight Against Coronavirus."  

The hearing will look at "recent uses of aggregate and anonymized consumer data to identify potential hotspots of coronavirus transmission and to help accelerate the development of treatments." It will also examine privacy right protections and what the government plans to do with the COVID-19-related data at the end of the pandemic.  

What's a paper hearing? 

Appropriately, the committee has come up with a process for holding hearings in the age of social distancing and stay-at-home mandates.  

The witnesses will submit written testimony, as they usually do, and the chairman and ranking member will submit opening statements, as they usually do. Those will be posted online at the beginning of the paper hearing and committee members can send questions of those witnesses by the close of the day.  

Witnesses will have 96 business hours, or about two weeks, turnaround for their answers. Then both questions and answers will be posted on the committee's website.  

"Deep Packet Inspection can play a key role within cable operator networks; e.g., for traffic engineering and network security. But it presents significant shortcomings in holistically analyzing subscriber activity, which is key for both retention and growth." —Kate Mitchell, Edge Intelligence

Cable providers are at a critical juncture.

The number of consumers abandoning TV subscriptions for over-the-top offerings continues to grow. At the end of Q1, 3.4% of households cut the cord over the prior year, the highest rate ever, leaving about 83 million households paying for cable services in the U.S. This doesn’t include the increasing numbers among new households and younger demographics that have never subscribed to a pay TV service in the first place, a.k.a., “cord-nevers.”

Currently, approximately 13.5 million households (14% of all households) don’t pay for traditional forms of TV service. By 2021, eMarketer predicts, the number of cord-cutters will nearly equal the people who never had pay TV — a total of 81 million U.S. adults.

While this may all seem like doom and gloom for cable MSOs, it’s actually an opportunity to stop the cord-cutting trend and also win over cord-nevers through innovation. For cable operators to quickly turn the tide, it will require a stronger understanding of their subscriber base, or deeper than what’s possible with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).

Seeing the Limits of the Old

DPI has been the default method over the past decade for examining and managing network traffic; it runs in line with production traffic or sends copies of packets to a network monitoring connection to inspect packets flowing through the network. Data is extracted from within each packet.

DPI can play a key role within cable operator networks; e.g., for traffic engineering and network security. But it presents significant shortcomings in holistically analyzing subscriber activity, which is key for both retention and growth.

What are those obstacles? First, it’s very challenging and costly to scale a DPI offering since it relies on inspecting at the packet level, on every port, at increasingly high network speeds. In addition, it can be difficult and immensely time-consuming and labor-intensive to gain customer insight from DPI systems since the hardware can be siloed and spread across many locations deep inside the network.

So how can cable MSOs obtain the subscriber insight they need to positively impact their business?

New Analytical Architectures

Big data analytics — the process of examining large and diverse data sets — can enable MSOs to discover hidden patterns, previously unknown correlations, customer preferences and other highly useful information to help them make more informed business decisions. And network data for cable operators is big, with hundreds of billions of records added daily, generated from millions of subscribers, and the need to retain trillions of records for analysis and compliance purposes. 

So the collection, real-time correlation, analysis and retention requirements placed on the analytical architecture are demanding — and many big data architectures are unable to keep pace. Analytics should provide the granular insight into and throughout the entire customer lifecycle that cable providers need to effectively support things such as usage-based billing, support-related inquires, proactive upgrades to bigger plans and anticipating those likely to churn. That knowledge can help inform activities directly geared to current and prospective subscribers.

For example, with the knowledge of subscriber behaviors garnered from big data analytics, cable providers can grow revenues through initiatives such as targeted promotions and customized product offerings. For those predicted to churn, better customer service and incentive offers may help in maintaining their business.

And for consumers who no longer subscribe to cable services but do still have data plans, providers can use big data analytics to determine their OTT viewing, web content and download data so they can figure out how best to monetize this use of their network. With this deep level of knowledge, cable providers can have accurate insight on data consumption to make sure usage-based billing and capped data tiers can capture revenue to offset what they’re losing from paid TV.

Going Deeper

While DPI still has an important role in supporting cable MSOs, it’s not cutting it in this time of cord-cutting. What’s needed is a way to understand subscribers on a deeper level than DPI can provide. By being able to better analyze the immense amount of data that’s available, cable providers can be well positioned to provide customers with personalized offers that resonate, incentives that motivate and service that delights — helping providers to retain and grow their business.

Kate Mitchell is CEO of Edge Intelligence, a distributed analytics platform.

To achieve the same level of customer understanding that Amazon displays, CSPs and M&E firms must break out of an audience measurement mindset focused on age, gender and zip code. To do that means leveraging the strength of Big Data analytics. In this white paper, learn:

• • Why product silos are a drag on performance
• • How Big Data analytics can help an organization break down those walls
• • The role of Big Data analytics in granulizing audience metrics
• • How Big Data analytics can help build customer loyalty
• • The three steps to consider when looking for help with Big Data nalytics
• •Download this paper to learn more.

605, an advanced data and analytics company focused on the media and entertainment industries, has hired Sal Romanello as general counsel.

At 605, Romanello will be focused on drafting and negotiation of client and vendor agreements relating to data and information licensing, and professional service agreements, as well as providing general legal support and counsel to the entire organization, the company said.

RELATED: Charter Invests In, Partners With Dolan-Backed 605 for Advanced Advertising

Prior to joining 605, Romanello was a partner in the Complex Commercial Litigation Practice Group at the international law firm of Weil, Gotshal &  Manges LLP. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Fordham Law Alumni Association, and serves as chair of its Engagement Committee. He also serves as a member of the Rockville Centre Zoning Board of Appeals.  Romanello has a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University, and received his J.D. from the Fordham University School of Law.

New York-based 605 launched late last year following the acquisition of Analytics Media Group (AMG) by Dolan Family Ventures, the newly formed investment fund run by former Cablevision Systems execs Kristin and James Dolan that provides census-based TV measurement.

RELATED: Dolan Family Ventures Launches Data and Analytics Company 

“The needs and the complexity of our business are growing rapidly and it is therefore important to have counsel with deep expertise across legal, compliance, regulatory and business strategy,” Kristin Dolan, founder and CEO of 605, said in a statement. “Sal is someone who is passionate about pioneering a new field, partnering with stakeholders across our organization, and growing as our company grows and we are thrilled he is bringing his 20+ years of experience to 605.”

Waze, the crowd-sourced navigation app, is expanding its global presence after notching a deal with Nobex Partners, a company that works with more than 5,000 stations across about 100 counties.

The deal also expands the roster for Waze for Broadcasters, which works with both radio and TV partners.

The agreement will put Waze’s real-time traffic data and road condition information in the hands of radio stations around the world, enabling them to relay ETAs for various driving routes to listeners.  

Those Nobex Partners radio stations are getting access to two tools – Waze Traffic View (a dashboard that provides real-time reports on changing conditions and uses algorithms that can provide alternative routes and drive-times), and LiveMap, a Waze-branded map for Nobex Partner station web sites.

Waze and Nobex share a common goal of global coverage, Paulo Cabral, business development manager at Waze, explained.

Waze for TV, another product from the company’s broadcaster set, enables stations to transmit images/maps that show road conditions that are rendered with Waze’s data.

Wicket Labs, a startup that is run by execs who are late of thePlatform, has raised a $2 million round of seed financing and has introduced a data-driven “Scorecard” product that can help OTT providers and other direct-to-consumer digital media companies keep tabs on key areas such as engagement, churn and customer-acquisition costs.

Wicket Labs said Madrona Venture Group, Divergent Ventures and undisclosed angel investors joined the $2 million round. It also announced the appointment of new members to its advisory board -- Krishan Bhatia, EVP of business operations and strategy for NBCUniversal’s ad sales unit; Dustin Hillard, CTO of Versive, a machine learning company based in Seattle; and Mike Berkley, previously SVP of product management for Viacom.

RELATED: Startup Brings Vision to Video Cloud’s ‘Blind Spot’

In tandem with its partners, Wicket Labs’s new Scorecard product is designed to obtain data from various sources that are traditionally housed in separate silos and aggregate,  analyze and normalize that information into a form that can help to drive decisions that can aid with engagement, customer acquisition, conversion rates, and churn.

That combined and analyzed data can provide key predictive information about customers and audiences, Marty Roberts, CEO of Wicket Labs, explained.

RELATED: Learn More at the TV Data Summit, part of #NYCTVWK

Roberts co-founded WicketLabs with chief strategy officer Ian Blaine, who also started thePlatform, the online video publishing company that Comcast acquired in 2006. Roberts joined thePlatform that year and eventually rose to co-CEO before departing in 2015.

Roberts said the data is particularly helpful to publishers who are transitioning from print to digital as well as a growing array of OTT video services, including authenticated TV Everywhere offerings from MVPDs and programmers, that continue to chip away at viewership of traditional TV.

Rather than relying on their gut feelings, data will help them make decisions and get a better fix on their audience, and how customers are coming through the door (i.e. through social media, digital ads, search, email) and get a better sense of their company’s value, Roberts said.

“They are all learning a new vocabulary,” he added.

Change is the new constant in the media and entertainment industry, as the fundamental nature of competition in the industry has shifted. No longer do television shows merely compete with television shows, theatrical releases with theatrical releases, video games with video games, etc. With more content now available than any of us can consume in a lifetime, all content and content offers are competing with each other in real time for a precious slice of each consumer’s time.

In this era of hyper competition and digital connectedness, a new business model is emerging, one powered by data, with the consumer firmly at its center. Data has become M&E’s secret weapon for sustaining and improving consumer engagement and satisfaction. It’s data that can reconcile a world of ubiquitous distribution with a consumer’s finite amount of time to consume content. And it’s just getting started: By 2020, data scientists estimate that for every human on the planet, there will be 1.7 MB of data being produced. Every second.

Leveraging that data is essential as M&E companies compete for consumers’ time, advocacy and money across multiple platforms. Those that know consumers best will win.

Enter cognitive computing, which has the ability to examine the choices consumers are making, and under what circumstances, in order to understand and predict what consumers will want next. Although some pundits have framed artificial intelligence and machine learning as a person-versus-machine comparison, at IBM we view the most productive implementation of AI as a symbiosis of person and machine.

Computers are good at rapidly processing enormous amounts of data and looking for hidden patterns and valuable attributes. The human brain is highly adept at other skills, such as generalization and abstraction. Together these make up Augmented Intelligence and the possibility of better decision making in all functions of business, from production and distribution to sales and marketing.

Two core domains are driving the application of machine learning. One is “audience” (customer or consumer) insight -- reaching a new level of personalization by understanding their affinities, traits, likes, dislikes, and how they respond to media. The other is “content” insight -- the enrichment of metadata and understanding what’s in the content to exploit it in new ways, in new formats and across new channels of distribution. Combine these, and M&E companies can apply cognitive insights to improve KPIs, including ad sales, content ultimates, productivity and efficiency, and margin growth.

Consider the ongoing Major League Baseball season. Using cognitive technology, media companies can now take baseball-related video content and better understand it in terms of sentiment -- including a closer look at actions that may indicate crowd excitement, or tuning in to crowd noise and the tone of the sportscaster’s commentary to gauge key moments -- and surface it to fans for a more personalized viewing experience.

Cognitive computing is a natural enhancement to existing business practices that will make day-to-day operations more effective while helping media companies create a better consumer/user experience. AI is a positive disruption, one that demonstrates the art of the possible. Most importantly, it’s an opportunity to thrive in an age of constant change -- the firms that are better equipped to extract insights from data are the likely winners.

Steve Canepa is general manager, global telecommunications, media & entertainment industry, at IBM. Image by John Lund/Getty Images.

ZoneTV, a "digital-first” video service that’s targeting integrations with MVPD set-tops, said it is working with Ooyala and Microsoft to help it automate and fine-tune the creation of a new lineup of OTT-delivered linear-style TV channels that are set to debut this fall.

ZoneTV said it will underpin that effort  with “media lifecycle tools” from Ooyala (its  Flex CMS) alongside Microsoft’s Video Indexer (part of Azure’s Cognitive Services platform), for its coming array of “Dynamic Channels.”

ZoneTV said that combo will give it the ability to curate about 6,000 hours of videos “on the fly” to create those channels. Those tools, it added, uses advanced algorithms to characterize content and auto-extract and analyst metadata into genres, and pull topics from speech and text in a way that optimizes the curation process.

RELATED: ZoneTV Goes on Content Hunt

“We’re building the next generation of pay-TV services, so we need next-generation tools. With the combination of Ooyala’s platform and Microsoft’s cognitive computing services, the ZoneTV Programming Studio delivers an unmatched capability to enhance the TV ecosystem and translate into a one-of-a-kind viewer experience,” Jeff Weber, ZoneTV’s CEO, said in a statement.

ZoneTV, formerly known as ES3, initially targeted Mediaroom, the IPTV middleware platform that Ericsson acquired from Microsoft in the fall of 2013 that powers pay TV services from companies such as AT&T, Hawaiian Telecom, Telus, Frontier Communications and CenturyLink.  DirecTV, now part of AT&T, was ZoneTV’s first launch partner outside the Mediaroom environment. Comcast also integrated ZoneTV’s “Santa Tracker” app on its X1 platform during the 2016 holidays.

RELATED: Comcast’s X1 Takes ‘Santa Tracker’ Over-the-Top

Charter Communications has made an undisclosed investment in advanced data and analytics firm 605 as part of a broader partnership that will help the MSO offer more impression-based, targeted advertising opportunities in all its markets.  

New York-based 605 launched late last year following the acquisition of Analytics Media Group (AMG) by Dolan Family Ventures, the newly formed investment fund run by former Cablevision Systems execs Kristin and James Dolan that provides census-based TV measurement.

RELATED: Dolan Family Ventures Launches Data and Analytics Company

Under the partnership, Charter will provide 605 with aggregated and anonymized set-top data from all of its U.S. cable systems. In turn, 605 will use its own proprietary data infrastructure and analytics systems to enhance advertising and campaign measurement solutions for Spectrum Reach, the ad sales division of Charter.

605 will be used to help power Spectrum Reach’s AudienceApp, a tool for linear media planning and optimization. Charter, which introduced AudienceApp in New York during a NewFront presentation in May, said Spectrum Reach plans to launch the product in Austin, Texas, on August 15, and complete the roll out across the MSO’s footprint by mid-2018.

RELATED: Charter Adds Advanced Ad Products at NewFronts

“Everybody is using data now, but not a lot of people can make sense of it,” David Kline, EVP at Charter and president of Spectrum Reach, said. “We felt that 605 and their management team would be terrific partners because they understand data. We think it could be a great venture between the two of us."

He said 605 has been helping Charter build AudienceApp, a media planning tool that optimizes linear television buys. By way of example, Kline explained that the app could help a car dealership target specific territories and audiences and get more bang from their buck by employing an optimized schedule of available TV ad inventory.

The data used is aggregate and does not use any personally identifiable information (PII), but it can highly optimize the ad schedule to reach the homes desired, he said.

“We’re really going to use it as the backbone of all our local sales opportunities across 41 states, 100 DMAs and about 1,500 commissioned sales people,” said Kline, an industry vet who joined Charter in 2015 and is also late of Visible World (now part of Comcast), Ensequence, and was previously president and COO of  Cablevision Media Sales (Cablevision Systems is now part of Altice USA).”This is a whole new way for us to sell.”

Kristin Dolan, CEO and founder of 605, said the Charter agreement represents a unique partnership opportunity for her company. At the same time, 605, she added, licenses data from other third parties and is moving ahead on goal to do what it’s doing for Charter on a national basis for programmers and brands in a PII-compliant way.

She said it also speaks to a broader trend in which data, targeting and impression-based campaigns become a critical part of the TV advertising world.

"I think it really is the culmination of a desire for people to continue to utilize television, but wanting this specialized targeting that they experience with digital," she said. "We're obviously strong believers in TV. We're big believers in an optimized media mix, but TV has to be a part of most advertisers' initiatives...but not just targeted advertising to drive impulse-buying and specific buying, but also for brand development and for brand loyalty."

605 also announced that Kline and James Blackley, EVP, engineering and information technology at Charter, are part of an initial board that also includes Kristin Dolan, who is also managing partner of Dolan Family Ventures, and James Dolan, now executive chairman of The Madison Square Garden Company.

Investment banking firm PJT Partners is providing consulting services to Dolan Family Ventures and provided advisory support for the Charter partnership.

Former Cablevision Systems exec Kristin Dolan is extending her business acumen to the world of fast food.

Dolan, the former COO of Cablevision (now part of Altice USA), has been appointed to the board of The Wendy’s Company, which, through the appointment, has bumped the size of its board from 11 to 12 members.

Dolan is now CEO of 605 LLC, an audience and data analytics company.

RELATED: Dolan Family Ventures Launches Data and Analytics Company

She and her husband, James Dolan, the former CEO of Cablevision, have also formed an investment fund, Dolan Family Ventures, that is focused on providing capital to data, analytics and tech-based, media-focused businesses.

Kristin Dolan also also serves as a director of AMC Networks, The Madison Square Garden Company and Revlon Inc.

"My fellow Board members and I are delighted to welcome Kristin to serve on our Board,” Nelson Peltz, Wendy’s board chairman, said in a statement. “Her impressive experience in the media and entertainment marketing industries, coupled with her extensive experience as a chief executive officer, chief operating officer and public company director, brings valuable expertise and an insightful perspective to our Board."

Dipayan Ghosh would like to be an “algorithmic ethicist.”

If that sounds daunting and a bit indecipherable, no worries. He’s got a PhD from Cornell in electrical and computer engineering and is working with Harvard and New America on web civil rights issues.

Then there were the years spent working on tech policy at the White House under President Obama, trying to put legislative legs under the Broadband Bill of Rights—which, like many other efforts over the past few years, never became law. He also worked on the White House’s eventual, and successful, support for Title II.

That was followed by a stint as privacy and policy advisor at Facebook. Now, at 27, he's with New America as part of a new public interest technology team of fellows.

Ghosh talked with Multichannel News Washington Bureau chief John Eggerton about network neutrality, the search for algorithmic diversity and how game theory could drive a marketplace model for privacy.

[For a shorter version of this interview, click here.]

MCN: Tell us about yourself.
Dipayan Ghosh: I’m a computer scientist by training and did my PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. In graduate school, I grew more interested in information theory, which is the study of how you send information from point A to point B as securely and efficiently as possible.

I grew very interested in the subfield of security and privacy. After the [Edward] Snowden disclosures, the Obama Administration was under a lot of pressure to respond to the public outcry and at the time there was a lot of scrutiny about what surveillance practices the government, more broadly, might employ and what kind of protections there were and should be in the future on individual privacy.

MCN: So you decided to join that effort?
DG: Yes, it was a really interesting time to be there. John Podesta came in to lead the approach to these really difficult issues. The President commissioned a report back to him, and led by Podesta, that would be a comprehensive review of Big Data and privacy and the implications for individual rights across society.

During that time Podesta held meetings with every industry under the sun. We engaged with banks and Internet companies and a civil rights round table, which led to the report.

MCN: And remind us what the key recommendations were.
DG: Some of the big ones were around Internet privacy standards for the internet privacy Bill of Rights. There were suggestions around how we can approach the international conversation around privacy and the safe harbor arrangements with Europe. It dealt with student privacy in the context of educational technology that was powered through the collection and analysis of student data and how you can create ethical standards around that.

Another was around “algorithmic discrimination,” and whether there were ways that Big Data in use by many sectors of private industry is potentially creating discriminatory impacts across society and how we can protect against that.

The civil rights round table brought that issue to the front, and really resonated with us as an issue that was important to get right.

MCN: And what has happened to the report since then?
DG: Out of that report came the Consumer Bill of Rights Act, a legislative proposal that came out of the White House in February 2015, as well as the Student Digital Privacy Act. That garnered bicameral, bipartisan support on the Hill, even though it hasn’t moved forward.

The conversation with Europe has progressed to where we renegotiated safe harbor and made a lot of progress, though there are new questions they are asking given the new political situation in the U.S.

So, yes, I think there were a lot of follow ups.

MCN: What else did you work on?
DG: We worked on net neutrality, which ultimately resulted in a recommendation by the President to reclassify common carriers under Title II. That recommendation came out on YouTube, of all places.

My appointment was across the National Economic Council and also the Office of Science and Technology. Many different groups across the White House were involved in net neutrality. And I think that led to some really progressive policies.

MCN: What made you move to Facebook?
DG: The safe harbor negotiations with Europe. I was particularly interested in moving to a company at the forefront of privacy. I worked in the privacy team within the policy organization at Facebook and worked partly on how we develop products in a way that is sensitive to users’s needs.

MCN: What are those needs and does this generation even want privacy?
DG: Obviously the conceptualization of privacy has evolved over time from decades ago being behind a wall and having your own physical space where you can have a reasonable expectation that nobody is spying on you, to today, where there are a lot of different platforms and a lot of different universes where we need to be aware of how we are perceived by others, if we care about that perception.

And Facebook has shown great leadership in that space. The kinds of privacy settings are top of the line. When I was studying this issue through an academic lens, I found it helps to think about it from a game theory perspective: Pit the end user against the corporation, say, a utility for example.

They both want to maximize their bottom lines and they don’t want to compromise that bottom line. For the consumer it’s their utility, for the corporation it’s their profits over time.

You have to consider many different things. It’s not just the up-front revenue you might have as a company or it’s not just the upfront savings you might have as a consumer. As a consumer, you might value the privacy and security of your information. As a company, you might value that information as well so that you can route power more effectively or be able to monetize it in different ways, let’s say the advertising ecosystem.

At the end of the day, both want to maximize their value.

And I think if you look at it from that perspective and say that by default I want my Nash Equilibrium (game theory speak for a solution in which neither player has an incentive to change no matter what the other player does) to be a solution where both the consumer and the company choose privacy rather than no privacy.

When you look at it from that perspective, you can reach the set of conditions that you need and achieve that equilibrium, to achieve that market-stable situation of both entities opting for privacy-aware design or privacy-preserving technology, or privacy and security applied to data security protections on a network, or encryption.

I think that when you look at it from an economic perspective, reasonable and sensible regulation is a good thing, and user education is a good thing. People need to be aware of where their data is going and what the privacy framework in the industry is.

MCN: Could privacy become a value-added differentiator in the marketplace for ISPs?
DG: I think a company needs to ask all those questions and figure out what is the right approach for them. Now, I think that some might insinuate that ISPs will take the action that is not good for privacy, especially in the absence of regulation.

But that is where advocates and other people in the public can come forward and really make known the concerns they have around these issues. I think that history has shown that can have a great impact on the courses of action that corporations take.

MCN: What are you working on now?
DG: I started this fellowship at New America and I want to look at the intersection of privacy and civil rights, how privacy and anti-discrimination policy can be incorporated into algorithms.

MCN: Which means?
DG: There was an issue in the White House report on Big Data discrimination, or algorithmic discrimination, or algorithmic fairness, or bias. There are different ways that people reference it, but essentially it is the idea that algorithms [sets of computer commands to accomplish a task] can be designed in such a way that leaves civil rights in the lurch.
In other words, they could have a discriminatory impact on society if the algorithms were not designed responsibly.

MCN: Sort of like algorithmic red lining?
DG: Yes. One example that has been referenced in the White House report is with an application called Street Bump, which basically crowdsources pothole information.

Boston partnered with them to learn where potholes were in real time, then go out and repair them. It turned out that the potholes that were getting repaired were in richer, younger neighborhood. Obviously you don’t fault the people who designed the algorithm from the get-go. It’s very hard to perceive that this issue might surface until you observe it.

But then they went in and compensated for it, which is the most incredible thing. But if they hadn’t, that would have potentially created a mechanism for discriminatory impacts.

MCN: So, it requires factoring in human nature with algorithmic theory?
DG: Absolutely. I think that in general, as an engineer myself, we design technology that will create the most value as efficiently as possible for the people we are designing it for.

Sometimes we might not be trained on the legal basis for certain civil rights laws or other legal or regulatory systems.

So, I think it is important to educate engineers and people thinking of how to design algorithms, on how they can think about these issues. You can call it algorithmic ethics. Then have them monitor the inputs and outputs from their algorithms and the effects and outcomes so if there is some evidence of distorted or disparate impact, it can be corrected.

MCN: So, you are trying to be an algorithmic ethicist?
DG: That’s a really nice title. I think it is a really difficult area to get your head around because there are so many different companies that are designing algorithms and it is really hard to think about how to design ethical standards that apply across the board.

Perhaps the best way to think about it is, sector by sector, industry by industry, looking at what types of standards could be established for the use and implementation of algorithms so that you can factor out, as best you can, these discriminatory impacts as they manifest themselves.

MCN: Facebook has been in the conversations about the proliferation of ‘fake news. Any thoughts?
DG: I think that company is moving in the right direction and starting to really have a positive conversation with a wide range of players who want to provide guidance as to what direction the platform should go. The start of that conversation has been really positive.

It’s a good step forward.

Dipayan Ghosh would like to be an “algorithmic ethicist.” If that sounds daunting and a bit indecipherable, no worries. He’s got a Ph.D. from Cornell in electrical and computer engineering and is working with Harvard and think tank New America on web civil-rights issues. Then there were the years spent working on tech policy at the White House under President Barack Obama, trying to put legislative legs under the Broadband Bill of Rights — which, like many other efforts over the past few years, never became law. That was followed by a stint as privacy and policy adviser at Facebook. He’s now with New America as part of a new public-interest technology team of fellows. Ghosh talked with Multichannel News Washington bureau chief John Eggerton about network neutrality, the search for algorithmic diversity and how game theory could drive a marketplace model for privacy.

[For the full-length, uncut version of this interview, click here.]

MCN:Tell us about yourself.
Dipayan Ghosh: I’m a computer scientist by training and did my Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science. In graduate school, I grew more interested in information theory, which is the study of how you send information from point A to point B as securely and efficiently as possible.

I grew very interested in the subfield of security and privacy. After the [Edward] Snowden disclosures, the Obama administration was under a lot of pressure to respond to the public outcry and, at the time, there was a lot of scrutiny about what surveillance practices the government, more broadly, might employ and what kind of protections there were and should be in the future on individual privacy.

MCN:So you decided to join that effort?
DG: Yes, it was a really interesting time to be there. John Podesta came in to lead the approach to these really difficult issues. The president commissioned a report back to him, and led by Podesta, that would be a comprehensive review of Big Data and privacy and the implications for individual rights across society.

MCN:And what has happened to the report since then?
DG: Out of that report came the Consumer Bill of Rights Act, a legislative proposal that came out of the White House in February 2015, as well as the Student Digital Privacy Act. That garnered bicameral, bipartisan support on the Hill, even though it hasn’t moved forward. The conversation with Europe has progressed to where we renegotiated safe harbor and made a lot of progress, though there are new questions they are asking given the new political situation in the U.S.

We worked on net neutrality, which ultimately resulted in a recommendation by the president to reclassify common carriers under Title II. That recommendation came out on YouTube, of all places. My appointment was across the National Economic Council and also the Office of Science and Technology.

MCN:What made you move to Facebook?
DG: The safe harbor negotiations with Europe. I was particularly interested in moving to a company at the forefront of privacy. I worked in the privacy team within the policy organization at Facebook and worked partly on how we develop products in a way that is sensitive to users’ needs.

MCN:What are those needs, and does this generation even want privacy?
DG: Obviously, the conceptualization of privacy has evolved over time from decades ago being behind a wall and having your own physical space where you can have a reasonable expectation that nobody is spying on you, to today, where there are a lot of different platforms and a lot of different universes where we need to be aware of how we are perceived by others.

When I was studying this issue through an academic lens, I found it helps to think about it from a game theory perspective: Pit the end user against the corporation, say, a utility for example. They both want to maximize their bottom lines and they don’t want to compromise that bottom line. For the consumer, it’s their utility; for the corporation, it’s their profits over time. As a consumer, you might value the privacy and security of your information. As a company, you might value that information as well so that you can route power more effectively or be able to monetize it in different ways, let’s say the advertising ecosystem. At the end of the day, both want to maximize their value.

MCN:What are you working on now?
DG: I started this fellowship at New America and I want to look at the intersection of privacy and civil rights, how privacy and anti-discrimination policy can be incorporated into algorithms. There was an issue in the White House report on Big Data discrimination, or algorithmic discrimination, or algorithmic bias. There are different ways that people reference it, but essentially it is the idea that algorithms [sets of computer commands to accomplish a task] can be designed in such a way that they could have a discriminatory impact on society if not designed responsibly.

MCN:Sort of like algorithmic red-lining?
DG: Yes. One example that has been referenced in the White House report is with an application called Street Bump, which basically crowd-sources pothole information.

Boston partnered with them to learn where potholes were in real time, then go out and repair them. It turned out that the potholes that were getting repaired were in richer, younger neighborhood. Obviously, you don’t fault the people who designed the algorithm from the get-go. It’s very hard to perceive that this issue might surface until you observe it. But then they went in and compensated for it, which is the most incredible thing. If they hadn’t, that would have potentially created a mechanism for discriminatory impacts.

Read More: Click here for the full-length, uncut version of this interview.

NEW YORK — Amid all the new shows being launched at upfront presentations last week, there were some announcements made about the way advanced advertising techniques could help networks sell products.

At ESPN, big data about the emotions of sports fans and real-time information about what’s happening in games are being tapped to create more effective advertising.

ESPN’s analytics team broke down games into emotional triggers, said Vikram Somaya, senior vice president and global data officer. More than 700 triggers can happen over a single NFL game, he said. That data was overlaid on the millions of fans who connect with ESPN.

ESPN mapped those fans and all of the emotions they could be feeling during a game — triumph, happiness, anticipation, dismay and more. Then it got together with its sponsors. Coors Light tapped into fans’ moments of anticipation, running emotion-related, tailored messaging, before, after and during games. The ads drove a 16% lift in brand consideration, including a 31% increase during pregame.

Ed Erhardt, president, global sales and marketing at ESPN, said emotional databased sales are a small part of ESPN’s business, but with 30 advertisers now employing it, it is likely to grow.

At Turner, ad sales president Donna Speciale talked about the need to improve advertising. “Television is still the most powerful medium for your marketing message,” she said. “But I think we can agree our industry was in need of a reinvention.

“Helping our partners thrive starts with creating the right experiences for our fans, so two years ago we announced reduced commercials in primetime, first on truTV and later on TNT,” Speciale said. “That investment is paying off with powerful results in three key areas: deeper engagement, increased brand awareness, and increased sales versus the traditional pods. Now I understand you’re tired of paying more for less. Well now, consider paying more for more.”

iSpot.tv has introduced an enhanced ad-tracking system that uses data culled from millions of smart TVs to determine the effectiveness of TV ads akin to the way the performance of digital advertising can be monitored and measured.

Tracking how much attention consumers give to those ads all the way to a “conversion” – an action such as visiting a web site or registering or making a purchase – “is a journey that the TV networks are going through,” Sean Muller, iSpot.tv’s CEO, explained.

That same system, he added, also tells advertisers the optimal number of times a TV ad must be seen before a conversion takes place, and gives a good sense of which ads are the most effective, as well as how they are performing on specific channels and networks, specific shows and genres, and at different parts of the day.

Clients, he said, can remove some of the guess-work from the equation by using this data when they launch their campaigns, determine what's working, adjust, “and then step on the gas.”

Using this data to determine the conversion rate and overall effectiveness of TV advertising, “fills a major void in the marketplace” and represents a “leap beyond…audience targeting,” Muller said, noting that nearly 30 brands are already adopting iSpot.tv’s new offering, including two large wireless carriers, major automakers, and a mix of banks, financial services firms and insurance carriers. He hopes to expand that number to 60 to 80 by year-end.

For the ad-impression data gathering, iSpot.tv has a partnership/integration agreement with TV giant Vizio. Muller said that relationship started about three years ago with his company’s ad catalog.

 “We are assessing and talking to others,” he said. “It’s a very complex integration.”

Experian, the credit monitoring service, is one client that iSpot.tv is allowed to identify.

In a campaign in January, it found 123,175 “conversion events” from 15.52 million impressions from the smart TV population tracked by iSpot.tv’s system, giving the company a conversion rate of 0.790%. Experian used that data to test out different creative and was able to hone in on two 30-second spots that were the most effective.

Oracle has struck a deal to acquire Moat, a digital measurement company that counts clients such as ESPN, Facebook, NBCUniversal, Snapchat and YouTube.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but Oracle said Moat will join its Oracle Data Cloud unit which supplies data and analytics to marketers and publishers, but that Moat will also remain an “independent platform.”

Oracle hopes Moat will complement its platform, already used by brands such as Nestle, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever.

Oracle noted in its Q&A about the deal that it is reviewing Moat’s product roadmap.

TiVo has hired Walt Horstman as senior vice president and general manager, analytics and advertising, where he’ll lead a team tasked with improving ad targeting and effectiveness across devices and platforms.

Horstman joins TiVo from AudienceXpress, the programmatic TV ad subsidiary of Visible World, the ad-tech company acquired last year by Comcast.  Horstman, who previously served as SVP of media solutions at Visible World, is also late of Cablevision Systems (now part of Altice USA) and Accenture.

RELATED: Visible World Joins Comcast's Ad Orbit

Horstman will be based out of the TiVo’s New York office and report to Pete Thompson, the company’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.

RELATED: Rovi Seals Deal for TiVo

“As an accomplished executive with a proven track record of leading cross-functional teams, Walt brings renewed perspective and deeply relevant experience to TiVo’s analytics and advertising offerings,” Thompson said, in a statement. “His diverse background and industry knowledge surrounding data-driven insights and advanced TV advertising make him especially well-suited for this role and we’re thrilled to have him on-board to further our analytics strategy.”

Horstman holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and German literature from Amherst College and a masters of business administration, marketing and technology management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He also spent time studying German language and literature at Freie Universitat in Berlin.

605, the advanced data and analytics company focused on the media and entertainment industry, said it has appointed five execs to help form its senior leadership team, reaching into areas such as analytics, technology, client services and finance.

New York-based 605 launched late last year following the acquisition of Analytics Media Group (AMG) by Dolan Family Ventures, the newly formed investment fund run by former Cablevision Systems execs Kristin and James Dolan.

RELATED: Kristin and James Dolan Form Tech Investment Fund

The new appointments at 605 are:

-Ray Casazza, senior vice president of finance and administration. He previously was VP of financial planning and analysis at Cablevision Systems and Altice USA (which acquired Cablevision last year).

-Colleen Moraghan, senior vice president of data solutions. She most recently was VP of audience measurement at Cablevision.

-Chris Frommann, group vice president of technology. He most recently was founder and VP of engineering for AMG.

-Peter Foley, Ph.D., group vice president of analytics. He joins 605 after serving as director of analytics at AMG.

-Gaurav Shirole, group vice president of product and client solutions. Shirole was a founder of AMG and served as VP of product and client services.

Those execs join 605’s leadership team, comprised of founder and CEO Kristin Dolan; co-founder and president Ben Tatta; EVP of client solutions Chauncey McLean; and SVP of marketing and communications Charlstie Veith.

“Following the acquisition of AMG, we have built a strong management team at 605 – everyone on the team is deeply embedded in the industry and well-suited to drive success for our growing company,” Kristin Dolan said, in a statement. “We are very pleased with the depth, quality and tremendous momentum we have created thus far.”

“We have been working closely with everyone on the senior leadership team at 605, providing clearly defined roles and responsibilities and we feel confident that we have the best team in place to spearhead every facet of our business,” Tatta added.

605 is code for “DCV,” or Data Co. Ventures, the original project name of Dolan Family Ventures. DCV is also the Roman numeral equivalent of 605.

DVR usage climbed in 2016, but live viewing continues to dominate the way consumers watch TV, Altice USA concluded in new report that analyzes data from millions of set-top boxes across the operator’s Optimum (former Cablevision Systems) footprint.

Per the operator’s Data Flash Review, live TV in the Optimum footprint “held steady”  in 2016 versus 2015, representing 91.9% of overall viewing, compared with DVR “engagement” (4.9%) and VOD (2.7%). Of those categories, DVR viewing rose 9% year-on-year, with an average of 1 hour and 47 minutes per day, and representing the most popular time-shifted or on-demand viewing method.

Among other findings of the report, Optimum homes averaged eight hours of tuning per day in 2015 and 2016. News programming tune-in rose 4%, with a surge of 99% for political-focused programs thanks to the election season, and sports programming tune-in dipped 4%. The full infographic illustrating the study findings can be found here.

The report’s Optimum TV household viewing trends are based on an analysis of anonymous, census-level viewing data of 2.6 million active tuning households in the New York tri-state area. This report did not factor in tune-in analysis of Suddenlink homes. Altice acquired Suddenlink in December 2015, and closed its deal for Cablevision last June. 

“Optimum customers love watching television and live tune-in continues to be the most popular way they choose to access their favorite content,” Paul Haddad, Altice’s global chief data officer, said in a statement. “We have also seen customers take advantage of options to watch programming on their own terms, with viewing up substantially on our DVR platform. With deep insights into the viewing trends of our Optimum customers, Altice USA is able to constantly innovate and prioritize new features and services that align with consumers’ preferences and demands.”

TVSquared said it has wrapped up a $3 million investment round from a group of new and existing investors that includes private equity fund West Coast Capital.

TVSquared, a supplier of same-day TV ad campaign measurement and optimization services founded in 2012, said it has raised more than $5.5 million.

TVSquared also announced the appointment of Chris van der Kuyl as board chairman, joining a board that includes Calum Smeaton (founder and CEO, TVSquared), Paul Davidson (West Coast Capital), Peter Kern (InterMedia Partners) and Joan Saywood (CFO, TVSquared).

TVSquared, which teamed with iSpot.tv last year to link TV ad airings to sales, said technology has been deployed by 350 brands in 46 countries, claiming it has improved TV campaign efficiency by 20% to 80%. Per a case study page posted online, brands that have used TVSquared’s platform include GoodRx, Diet Chef, Match.com, Budget Direct, Home Run Media, and PayAsUGym.com.

“Data analytics is a space we understand extremely well and, in assessing TVSquared, we saw a compelling analytics technology capable of making significant ROI for clients. Compelling technology, an experienced team and a global play made this an exciting investment,” van der Kuyl said, in a statement.

Altice said it has added Paul Haddad to its management team as global chief data officer, where he will head up the creation of an analytics practice across the company’s telecom and media subsidiaries.

Additionally, he will head up the launch of the company’s local and global advertising solutions and “drive the development of innovative products and pricing strategies in each of our territories,” the company said.

Haddad, who reports to Altice Group CEO Michel Combes and Altice chairman and CEO Dexter Goei, will also continue to expand Altice USA’s advanced data analytics business.

Haddad had been serving as SVP and GM, advanced data analytics at Cablevision Media Sales. Altice closed its acquisition of Cablevision Systems in June.

“Paul has a deep expertise in how data analytics and advanced advertising can maximize media opportunities for clients across all platforms, and he is the ideal executive to bring these solutions to our businesses across the globe,” Combes said, in a statement.

“As a proven leader in the evolving advertising and data insights landscape, we are enthusiastic that Paul will continue to drive the ongoing development of the U.S. data analytics business,” Goei added.

Haddad, Altice said, brings it 20 years of entrepreneurial and multi-national experiences in the fields of big data analytics, advanced advertising, programmatic, optical networking, wireless backhaul, and network management. Haddad is also late of Concurrent Computer Corp.,  Solusia Technologies and Nortel Networks.

He holds an electrical engineering degree from Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), speaks five languages, and holds multiple patents in the advanced data & information management systems, as well as bandwidth trading domains. 

A full 74% of NBC viewers watch primetime in real time, according to a new survey from TiVo, just ahead of the 72% who do so at CBS. ABC weighed in at 71% and Fox at 68%, while The CW, with its young-skewing audience, had just 57% of prime programming watched live.

In terms of all-day viewing, NBC and CBS tied at 82%.

Among the top 10 cable networks, ESPN was, not surprisingly, the most live viewed in prime at 93%, ahead of TBS at 90%, CNN at 89%, History at 88% and Food Network, Fox News, HGTV and USA at 87%.

Related: Early Upfront Prices At Double-Digit Levels

CW had the top three time-shifted shows on broadcast: The Flash at 63.1% time-shifted, Arrow at 58.8% and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow at 57%. Then it was NBC’s The Blacklist and ABC’s Modern Family both at 54.3%.

Read more at B&C.

Big Data can help companies make predictions about a lot of things. How much bandwidth will I need two years from now? What are my opportunities to upsell a customer? How vulnerable is my network to an outage? Which country will win the most medals in Rio this summer?

The latter is what Gracenote is taking an informed stab at today using its trove of sports data, including performance info tabulated from thousands of events since the 2012 Summer Games, including World Championships and World Cups (or equivalent), and an Olympic database that goes back more than 100 years.

Gracenote, which launched a sports unit last year after acquiring two sports data firms last year (Infostrada Statistics B.V. and SportsDirect), revealed a “Virtual Medal Table” that predicts that Team U.S.A. will come away with 102 medals (42 gold, 29 silver and 31 bronze), beating out China’s 78 medals, Russia’s 66 and host country Brazil’s 25.

Broken down further, Gracenote’s forecast  also sees the U.S. leading the most popular events at the Summer Games -- swimming, artistic gymnastics and athletics (track and field) – expected to bring home 31 medals for athletics, 24 for swimming and 8 for gymnastics.

Among Gracenote’s predictions for individual athletes, Gracenote’s data sees Michael Phelps notching five gold medals (100m butterfly, 200m butterfly, 200m individual medley, 4x100 medley, 4x200m freestyle), and one bronze medal (4x100m freestyle), with Katie Ledecky nabbing four gold medals (200m freestyle, 400m freestyle, 800m freestyle, 4x200m freestyle).

Gracenote’s data also sees Argentina getting just two medals, which would be its worst result since Barcelona 1992. 

Gracenote’s findings arrive about 100 days before the Rio games get underway on August 5. We’ll check back at the conclusion of the global sporting event to see how they fared.

Big Data firm Guavus apparently has some big plans involving the Reference Design Kit, the preintegrated software stack for IP-capable set-tops and gateways that’s being managed by Comcast, Liberty Global and Time Warner Cable.

Guavus said it has joined a large group of companies to license to RDK, noting that it will use that to bring its data analytics apps and capabilities to the platform, which, for example, is already a key component of Comcast’s X1 platform as well as devices that run the “new” Contour, a platform being rolled out by Cox Communications that is underpinned by X1.

Guavus said its analytics products can help partners improve operations, service assurance and customer care, and believes its involvement in RDK can play a role in accelerating the product cycle.

“One of the key benefits of RDK is the volume of CPE performance data that can be gathered from the field,” Steve Heeb, president and GM of RDK Management, said in a statement. “By collecting and analyzing this data, operators can quicken the pace for targeted product releases. We are very pleased to welcome Guavus to the RDK Community.”

“Customer experience is fast becoming the most important end product for operators,” added Gabriele Di Piazza, SVP products and marketing for Guavus. “The role of collaborative and cross functional decision making enabled by real-time analytics aligns with the fundamental goal in the RDK community, which is to deliver an agile infrastructure for delivering next-gen products at web speed.”  

Guavus joins a group of more than 250 companies that have licensed the RDK, spanning set-top makers, chipmakers, software developers, system integrators and network operators. 

Get more of MCN's Advanced Advertising coverage.

The explosion of available data is directly correlated with the content boom and multiplatform viewing, but the quest for better metrics is better proceeding at a measured pace, lest regulators stick their nose into the TV measurement business.

Those were the core themes voiced by the five participants in the vibrant panel session “Data-Driven: How Big Data Is Boosting the Value of TV Advertising” during Tuesday's Advanced Advertising Summit.   

“Content everywhere is changing how consumers consume,” said Aleck Schleider, VP of data and analytics for Videology. “They get things on different devices, in different formats. They are skipping advertising. And this in and of itself is forcing us to have a greater level of understanding. When people are searching for a deeper level of understanding, they are looking for different sources of data.”

In fact, “we are swimming in data,” said Pankaj Shroff, founder and CEO of Psychability, “so from the perspective of a technology provider, the question is, once an ecosystem has access to data, how do you make that data actionable?”

Kim Norris, COO of Viamedia, said one action that has evolved notably due to data is targeting.

“What’s been particularly interesting has been the introduction of vertical data sets,” she said. “You can look at things like voter registration data tied to viewing data to understand the behaviors of people who are falling into different categories politically. The appending of automotive data, pharma data, enables you to target.”

Lance Neuhauser, CEO of 4C Insights, said there is undue attention paid to standardization. Buyers and sellers in the market are inevitably going to reach different conclusions and make different strategic decisions based on the exact same piece of available data.

“They’re going to transact off it,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you have to have standard measurement in order to make that decision.”

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

As multichannel video programming distributors strive to boost subscriber loyalty in the face of increased competition, improving both customer care and network reliability is tantamount to their success.

Collecting and managing the Terabytes of data that providers receive from their customers and networks each day is a major part of delivering on those objectives.

Collection is easy — operators have been doing that for years. The trick is to analyze that information, then act and react to it in a timely fashion that improves subscribers’ perceptions of the customer experience.

To use big data effectively, distributors should look at their business decisions through a customer-experience lens, rather than just from an operations and technology standpoint, said Chris Menier, vice president of cable and media for Guavus, a data analytics company.

PARSING THE NOISE

Case in point: Operators receive tens of thousands of network alerts and alarms every day, Menier said. They can range from signal noise on a specific node to major blowouts. Big data analytics helps a network operator figure out how those alerts affect a customer’s experience, and helps parse how subscriber issues can be resolved with minimal impact to network operations or the bottom line.

Operators don’t need more information, Menier maintained. They need timely, contextualized information.

Breaking down the customer-care, operations and marketing silos and using all of that data simultaneously to solve problems and enhance service can help providers to improve the customer experience. That, in turn, leads to higher network promoter scores, lower churn and lower operational costs.

Sifting through operational data at a granular level doesn’t mean gathering more information, Menier said. It means using information that operators are already collecting more effectively.

For instance, rather than rebooting every modem overnight after an alarm is tripped, Guavus’s analytics can detect which modems are being affected and automatically send those customers a message explaining the problem and the solution. This approach both pinpoints where the operational problems reside and reduces calls into call centers and truck rolls, he said.

“We can turn detractors into promoters,” he said.

Over-the-top providers are delivering this kind of service now. Amazon Video, for instance, constantly monitors its quality of service and network operations. When something is amiss, Amazon subscribers recieve messages informing them of the problem and are issued credits commensurate with any interruption, said Kerry Sims, vice president, global solutions and smart infrastructure at Hitachi Consulting.

“This is the kind of proactive response consumers are increasingly demanding,” Sims said.

Because OTT providers are fully IP-configured, it’s easier to implement big data, Sims said. And it takes more than just network monitoring to meet customer-satistfaction goals.

INSIDE, OUTSIDE INFO

Information must be collated from both inside and outside a provider’s walled garden, including data on customer interaction via phone call, email or chat; social-media chatter; and even factors such as weather.

Effective use of big data “is like opening the aperture of a camera lens to better understand the whole scene,” Sims said.

AT&T analyzes more than 100 factors known to affect customer satisfaction, according to Nicole Rafferty, AT&T Entertainment Group’s vice president of customer experience and operations support . They include everything from call completion rates to terrain to posts on social media.

AT&T makes about 30 billion (yes, billion) overall service-assurance measurements across its wireless and wired networks in a typical hour, Rafferty said. It’s all aggregated and analyzed in real time to derive insights that help AT&T manage its network.

Customer-service agents use big-data analytics to parse the best way to remove those pain points, reducing time spent on the phone and improving the customer experience. For example, a virtual assistance speech-recognition tool makes it easier for AT&T subscribers to reach the right agent to solve their problems quickly and without a lot of number pushing or rerouting. The company worked with Interactions LLC to develop the tool, which understands when customers speak in complete, conversational sentences.

Since launching the product last year, AT&T has seen a 53% reduction in the number of callers who dial “0” to speak with an agent; most were able to resolve their issue without talking to an agent at all. Misdirected calls were down 36%, and the time customers spent with the automated system fell 28%. The tool should be in place company-wide by 2017, Rafferty said.

Comcast is using information from customer interactions to improve and personalize the call-center experience. For example, agents can access real-time, relevant context about a customer’s account to smooth customer interactions, said Comcast spokeswoman Jenni Moyer.

Agents can make recommendations based on prior interactions, the reasons the customer is calling at that moment, past service issues, etc.

“We can use this information to provide updates in our IVR system that gets customers to the right type of agent or information based on why they’re calling,” Moyer said. “We are also piloting technology to get the caller back to the same agent they talked to earlier.”

AT&T has created what it calls the Big Data Center for Excellence to gather and analyze the Terabytes of data it receives every day. The center works with AT&T’s business units to understand and eliminate pain points for customers, and makes the company more proactive.

“If you know you can be proactive, it takes the burden off the customer,” Rafferty said.

Predictive and proactive care may be the Holy Grail of improving the customer experience, but it’s really only one piece of the whole big-data picture, Matt Roberts, director of BDSI marketing at Amdocs, said.

“Some situations and parts of a company’s operations are better off when analyzed in real time,” he said. “But not everything has to be analyzed in real time.”

Using real-time big data analytics, a service provider can more quickly resolve network issues following customer calls and, perhaps more important, identify a customer’s issues before they he or she is even aware there is a problem. A service provider can either fi x the problem or reach out to let a subscriber know of a pending issue in advance and offer customers a salvo to ease the pain, Roberts said.

SETTING OTHER OBJECTIVES

Big data can also help operators also make strategic and long-term plans and that doesn’t necessarily require real-time analytics. For instance, by taking network data and overlaying it with customer data, an operator can determine when and where to upgrade plant first, Roberts said.

Big data can also be used to predict when components are likely to fail and be replaced before failures happen. It can pinpoint where new product launches will have the most impact, or determine which products are going to give a boost to customer satisfaction, Menier said.

Everything needs to be filtered through the customer lens, and big data analytics can help operators do that more efficiently and effectively.

“Big data has become a tangible entity,” Roberts said. “It’s gone from solving problems to helping make strategic long-term decisions.”  

comScore, on the heels of its merger with Rentrak, said it has inked a new long-term deal with Dish Network that renews its integeration of the pay TV provider’s viewing data with comScore’s TV measurement service.

Dish, which also operates OTT-TV service Sling TV, has a decade with Rentrak that spans almost a decade, and was Rentrak’s first data partner with a national footprint, they noted.

Financial terms of the new deal weren’t disclosed, but they said it will also help Dish measure addressable campaigns.

“DISH is a major partner that helped us change the measurement landscape by allowing massive and passive television measurement across a national footprint,” said comScore’s CEO Serge Matta, in a statement. “With our renewed partnership, advertisers can continue to get credible measurement, while creating ways to further increase the effectiveness and efficiency of advertising campaigns.”

“comScore and DISH have been pioneers for years, leading the industry with accurate viewership measurement,” added Adam Gaynor, VP of Dish Media Sales and Analytics. “This renewal signals our commitment to serving our customers and the industry’s desire for reliable measurement.”

Offering another indicator on how TV Everywhere services are performing, usage of those authenticated offerings reached 40% of U.S. pay TV subs in 2015, up from 22% in 2013, according to a new study from Parks Associates.

The study – Entertainment Habits on Connected CE Devices --  also took a look at the frequency of TVE usage, finding that 23% said they watch authenticated video at least once a month.

Those findings amplify some other recent studies that shined the light on TVE. For example, Digitalsmiths, the TiVo-owned maker of video search and recommendation services, found in its Q4 2015 Video Trends study that 40% of survey respondents said they are aware that their pay TV provider offers TVE apps, up 3.7% in two years, and up 13.6% over a three-year span.

“Content providers have been extremely aggressive in promoting their authenticated catch-up services, which is helping create traction for authenticated TV Everywhere services in the digital entertainment household,” Glenn Hower, research analyst at Park Associates, said, in a statement. “As usage increases, service providers and content companies alike will need to expand their big data capabilities, allowing them to create even more personalized services for their subscribers and viewers.”

Parks Associates noted that Hower will discuss his latest research and shed light on new pay TV strategies at Connections: The Premiere Connected Home Conference, set for May 24-26 at the San Francisco Hyatt. 

Big Data firm Guavus has hired former Hewlett Packard exec Roger Brooks to the post of chief scientist.

Brooks most recently was chief architect for HP software, and previously served as distinguished technologist and chief scientist in HP’s marketing optimization business. Before HP, he co-founded and led start-ups in the information analytics and mobile data services sector, and spent the first of his career in academia as a theoretical particle physicist at Stanford University and M.I.T., where he last served as an associate professor of Physics.

Brooks received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from M.I.T.

"We are delighted to add Roger to our team,” said Anukool Lakhina, CEO and founder of Guavus, in a statement. “His real-world experience in using analytics for actionable insights will bring value to our customers who are looking to drive costs out of their business, generate new revenue streams and transform into data-driven businesses.” 

“Guavus is pioneering the use of analytics to provide extremely precise, contextual insights that translate directly into action. This results in better customer experiences, more personalized care,and more efficient network operations,” added Brooks. “I look forward to working with the Guavus team to help our customers exploit their data by leveraging our unique multidisciplinary science to become more efficient, profitable and competitive.”

Cox Media Group has partnered with New York-based social media and audience analysis firm Shareablee, giving Cox social media data for more than 70 of its brands, including TV, digital and radio.

Cox plans to use Shareablee’s data to grow digital subscriptions and increase referral traffic from social media.

“Using Shareablee’s in-depth audience insights, we can provide our audience across more than 70 brands with content tailored to their interests and interactions,” said Apryl Pilolli, manager of social media analytics at Cox Media Group, in a statement. “Shareablee’s comprehensive data, deep understanding of the local media vertical, API and unsurpassed client services involvement were also key deciding factors in our selection of the social analytics product.”

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Comcast said its Xfinity Home platform will enable customers to reduce energy use and lower costs after integrating Earth Networks’ WeatherBug Home optimization software.

Under the deal, WeatherBug Home will provide the data and analytics for Xfinity Home’s energy-saving tool, EcoSaver, which learns the heating and cooling patterns of a home and makes automatic, incremental adjustments to the thermostat.

Comcast said Earth Networks processes 25 terabytes of “hyper-local, real-time, proprietary weather data” each day for 20 million consumers.

“Smart home controls are not just about convenience, they help home owners save money,” said Daniel Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, in a statement. “The cost of heating and cooling a home can account for almost half of a household’s overall utility bill, and over the past three years, our EcoSaver feature has helped save Xfinity Home customers $2.3 million. We think this new partnership with Earth Networks will inform our smart home platform with more data than ever and help our energy tracking tools become more accurate and effective for users.”

“The smart home is quickly becoming a reality, and when it comes to energy efficiency, knowledge is power,” added Earth Networks CEO Bob Marshall. “Our unique intelligent learning, coupled with our superior big data and modeling seamlessly delivers significant energy cost savings to consumers and energy efficiency and demand response to meet utility mandates.”

Comcast has more than 500,000 Xfinity Home customers. Of recent note, it has added several partners to its Works with Xfintiy Home certification program --  including the August Smart Lock, Chamberlain MyQ garage controller, Lutron’s Caseta’ wireless light controller and dimmer and the Nest Learning Thermostat --  and expects to add more to the mix later this year.

C.J. Anderson’s TD plunge late in Super Bowl 50 that extended the Denver Broncos’s lead over the Carolina Panthers was the “top moment” during the game, according to TiVo Research’s analysis of second-by-second data culled form 30,000 anonymous households.

On the ad front, the  Doritos – Sonogram spot was tops, according to that same data.

TiVo based its viewing interest findings by measuring the percentage of the TiVo audience watching in "play" speed.

“The most engaging ads are determined by looking for spots with the biggest increase in viewership relative to the viewership in the surrounding 15 minutes of programming, offering a true reflection of audience engagement,” the company noted.

Based on that data, here were the “top moments” from  Super Bowl 50:

1.10:04 p.m. ET, when Broncos running back C.J. Anderson plunged  into the end zone, giving the Broncos a 22-10 lead with three minutes remaining.

2.Super Bowl MVP Von Miller strips the ball from Cam Newton's hand with four minutes remaining in the 4th quarter, with the Panthers down by 6.

3.The replay showing Cam Newton backing away from the scramble for the lost football.

Here’s how the top ten commercials from the game stacked up when viewed through TiVo’s data lens:

1.Doritos – Ultrasound

2.Mountain Dew – PuppyMonkeyBaby

3.Quesalupa – Bigger Than Everything

4.Cascada – That Convertibles’ a Buick

5.Pepsi – The Joy of Dance

6.Marmot – Fall in Love with the Outside

7.Apartments.com – MovingOnUp

8.Bud Light – Raise One to Right Now

9.Skittles – The Portrait

10.Prius – Prius 4

RELATED: Big Blue Goes Big on Video Streaming [subscription required]

IBM said it has closed its acquisition of The Weather Company’s business-to-business, mobile and cloud-based web properties (including weather.com and Weather Underground), The Weather Company brand, and WSI, its global business-to-business brand.

As previously announced, IBM is not buying Weather’s cable TV unit. The Weather Channel will continue to operate independently, but will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract. Financial terms of the acquisition and the licensing agreement were not disclosed.

The Weather Company’s Cloud Data Platform will become the “backbone” for IBM’s Watson IoT Cloud platform.

IBM said The Weather Company will now be led by Cameron Clayton, The Weather Company’s’ former president, product and technology. The Weather Company has become part of IBM’s Data and Analytics Platform business unit.

David Kenny, former chairman and CEO of The Weather Company the once president of Akamai Technologies, will head up the IBM Watson platform business. Michael Rhodin, who launched the Watson business, will lead Watson Business Development, IBM said.

In tandem with the deal, IBM announced plans to expand weather.com into five new markets -- China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Japan, expecting to boost the site’s global user base by “hundreds of millions over the next three years.”

AOL, acquired by Verizon Communications last year, has made an acquisition of its own.

AOL this week announced it has snapped up AlephD, a Paris-based programmatic platform company “specializing in publisher analytics and price floor optimization” that will be tied into own, grander programmatic offering -- ONE by AOL for Publishers.

AOL said AlephD will help it drive more data into its platform and drive yield for its publishing partners. Adding price floor optimization, it added, will help publishers squeeze more value from visits to web sites and apps and calculate the “best price for each impression in real time.”

“AlephD will be a key part of ONE by AOL for Publishers, enhancing publishers’ ability to understand, control and optimize pricing and packaging of their inventory and drive greater revenue in an increasingly complex ecosystem trending towards mobile,” the company said.

In tandem with the acquisition, AOL announced the launch of ONE by AOL: Publishers, which supports multiple platforms, including desktops, mobile and over-the-top devices.

“Publishers face many obstacles and challenges in navigating the complexities of today’s media environment, and the walled garden technology solutions available to them today is underservicing their needs to capitalize on the consumer shift to mobile and video,” said Tim Mahlman, president of Publisher Platforms, AOL. “With ONE by AOL: Publishers, AOL is drawing on world-class, publisher-minded teams and technology solutions to redefine monetization and empower publishers to capture the maximum value of their content.”

TiVo Research said it will integrate its data into the Oracle Data Cloud, making it easier for advertisers to measure television audiences on their digital devices.

The deal will also help TV networks and programmers measure the impact of digital campaigns on viewership.

“This integration will give advertisers the ability to extend their TV media campaigns to reach viewers on their computers, cell phones, and other digital devices,” said Tara Maitra, TiVo’s senior VP, General Manager Content & Media Sales, in a statement. “It will also help TV networks and programmers connect the dots between TV and digital audiences to help marketers make better decisions.”

Read more at B&C. 

Canvs, a New York-based startup that uses Twitter data to help its partners interpret the emotions of the TV viewing audience, has raised a $5.6 million “A” round led by KEC Ventures.

Rubicon Venture Capital, Gary Vaynerchuck and BRaVe Ventures, Social Starts, and Milestone Venture Partners also participated in the round. Canvs said the fresh funds are tagged to fuel product development and growth.

While ratings tell part of the story (how many viewers are tuning in), Canvs aims to go deeper by mining and analyzing social TV data to help its partners understand how a TV show is resonating with viewers. How do those shows make them feel from moment to moment? What’s the emotional temperature of the audience? Are they excited? Mad? Sad? Amused? Zoning out? Do they love or hate a newly introduced character?

Canvs, explains company cofounder and CEO Jared Feldman, uses social TV data to illustrate “how fans are connecting with [a show] emotionally…No one is measuring excitement.”

Canvs, which uses Twitter data captured by Nielsen relevant to TV programming, claims its platform can get a fix on the emotional responses and tone of the audience, filtering and sifting through data based on how people actual “speak” on social media using expressions (WTF?, OMG!, “on fleek”)  that don’t necessarily directly convey how a computer would determine if viewers loved or hated about a show or what’s happening during a show.

“It’s important that there’s data parity, and that we’re speaking the same language as the viewer,” he said. “We’re very millennials focused.”

Canvs then maps those reactions to 56 emotion-based categories, such as love, dislike, annoying, beautiful, and boring. The company believes that such information, when presented and illustrated in Canvs’s Web-driven dashboard, provides valuable feedback for producers and  writers as they maintain and tweak story lines based, for example. And there’s an advertising angle -- the belief that an audience that is emotionally charged is more likely to remember or be more receptive to spots that run during a show.

Canvs is a subscription-based, syndicated platform that currently specializes in analyzing traditional first-run TV shows. Feldman said Canvs will also expand into over-the-top video later this year.

Canvs’s partners and customers include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, Fox, HBO, Viacom, Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency, among others.

More detail about Canvs and its technology/service will be featured in the January 25 edition of Next TV, a weekly section that runs in Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable.

Euclid Analytics, a company focused on location analytics, said it has closed a $20 million Series C funding round led by Cox Enterprises, with help from other new investors Groupe Arnault, Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and Gold Sky Capital.

Euclid, which has raised $44 million since its founding in 2010, said existing investors Benchmark, NEA and Harrison Metal also joined the round.

Euclid’s technology aims to provide businesses with a “holistic view” of the customer by factoring in data from a mix of online and offline channels. That data, it holds, helps brands provide a more “streamlined, personalized experiences in their physical stores.”

Euclid said a mix of retailers, quick-service restaurants, shopping malls, retail banks, and transportation hubs use its technology to analyze customer behavior in physical locations, noting that its cloud-based platform analyzes more than 10 billion daily “events” and 300 shopping sessions annually. Its software platform has been integrated with WiFi products from vendors such as Aerohive, Cisco Systems, HP/Aruba, Meraki, Ruckus Wireless and Xirrus.

“Technology is transforming how the world buys and sells products across all industries, and as a company that provides broadband communications, Cox understands the importance of Wi-Fi,” said Duncan O’Brien, Cox Enterprises’ senior vice president and general manager of corporate strategy and investments, in a statement. “With its extensive technology, Wi-Fi and data science expertise, Euclid is positioned to bridge the gap across the online and offline worlds in this new digitally-connected era of retail.”

O’Brien is also joining Euclid’s board of directors.