The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement said it will incorporate The Attention Council as a working group within CIMM.

CIMM’s Attention Working Group will be chaired by Andy Brown. It expects to publish a study on the state of attention management and the use of new metrics across the media and advertising business.

Brown will also join CMM’s Steering Committee.

“There has been exceptional growth in the use and development of attention by the industry — from the proliferation of innovative new approaches to the steady increase in buy-side adoption,” CIMM managing director Jon Watts said. “We are pleased to welcome TAC into CIMM to support this work, cementing metrics like attention, emotion and quality as critical components of our program. As we continue to work closely with other organizations and expand internationally, this collaboration marks the next step in our unified effort to support improvements, best practices and innovations across the industry.” 

The Attention Council was started in 2019 by Adelaide, Amplified Intelligence, Avocet, Lumen and TVision and has focused on the areas of quality, ethics, research, education and currency.

“I am excited by the new integration,“ Brown said. “I have admired the ARF and CIMM’s approach to client engagement and willingness to pursue research initiatives to meet the ever-changing developments in the media and advertising landscape.” 

Addressable ad campaigns deliver incremental reach to large and small ad campaigns, a new study found. 

According to A Guide to Best Practices in Planning and Buying Addressable Television Advertising from industry group Go Addressable and the Coalition for Innovative  Media Measurement (CIMM), when linear campaign reach as much as 40% of an audience, addressable ads 20 to 40 more reach points, a lift of 32% to 87%.

When a linear campaign’s reach is higher than 40%, addressable adds 5 to 10 more reach points, providing a lift of 15% to 28%, the report said. 

Addressable campaigns are relatively efficient on an effective cost per thousand viewers (eCPM) basis compared to the cost of traditional linear ad inventory when it comes to reaching light linear TV viewing audiences.

“The TV ad market is clearly changing, with viewing becoming far more widely distributed over a growing range of linear and non-linear services,” said Jon Watts, managing director of CIMM. “Addressable TV advertising has become an increasingly critical capability for the industry, helping advertisers to cost effectively build out the reach and frequency of their campaigns, including for larger target audience segments. Linear and addressable are better together.”

The report noted four cases in which addressable advertising is particularly useful. They are brands with low penetration target audiences, brands with small television budgets, brands whose linear television campaign reach curves have plateaued and brand that need to frequency cap at the household or set level.

“This is a pivotal time to be in addressable TV advertising,” said Larry Allen, VP and general manager of addressable TV enablement for Comcast Advertising. And board  chair for Go Addressable. 

“In today’s fragmented media landscape, the medium offers advertisers several key advantages for staying ahead of and anticipating shifting viewership habits, including targeted reach, ad relevancy and authenticated identity combined with the highest quality video ad inventory,” Allen said. “We hope that these best practices and insight will help the industry continue to move the needle forth on innovation as well as elevate, protect and prioritize the viewer experience.

Go Addressable is a non-profit trade group made up of the ad sales units of distributors including Altice USA’s a4 Media, Charter Communications’ Spectrum Reach, Comcast Advertising, DirectTV Advertising, Dish Media and Paramount.

The report found that MVPD addressable TV is more precise than IP address matching. An analysis found that 95% of addressable households were matched via postal address compared to 60% via IP address. After 30 days, 82% of addressable homes remained accurately matched compared to 44% of connected television homes.

It also found that MVPD addressable TV is not just for older adults. While many buyers believe that CTV addressable is best used to target younger audiences and multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) addressable is best used to target older audiences, the data show that CTV addressable and MVPD addressable play complementary roles in reaching adults 18-49.

In terms of best practices, the report recommends that advertisers develop a detailed audience target profile; benchmark the linear TV effect; determine the reach, scale and eCPM for various addressable pools; determine the point where the linear TV reach curve flattens out; and leverage all data and simulate the reach of the combined linear and addressable TV schedules.

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.”

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement said it has launched a study looking at opportunities to enhance the value of smart-TV data as part of television measurement systems.

As cord-cutting reduces the number of homes with set-top boxes, smart TVs have become an increasingly big source of data and information about TV viewing.

“Available from tens of millions of households, Smart TV data captures viewing behavior on a second-by-second basis, and can support both content and advertising measurement use cases,” said Jon Watts, CIMM’s managing director.

“However, the ecosystem is fragmented with limited standardization, content identification reference libraries are rarely comprehensive and measurement vendors have to determine how to deal with unidentified or unmatched fingerprints,” Watts said. “Many industry participants believe that there are opportunities to address these issues and we’re excited to work with our members to assess the various options, bringing together networks and programmers, CTV OEMs, agencies, measurement providers and other industry participants in a truly collaborative and inclusive undertaking.”

Also Read: ANA, 4As, CIMM To Study Multi-Currency TV Market

Measurement veteran Caroline Horner and will be supported by three expert advisers — Jonathan Steuer, Bill Harvey and Tom Morgan — and a project steering group from CIMM’s membership, including Howard Shimmel, Janus Strategy & Insights; Brian West, NBCUniversal Media; Helen Katz, Publicis Media; and Albert Lau, Omnicom Media Group.

“With the increase in video app usage and addressable advertising inventory, data from Smart TVs is becoming an important indicator of content consumption and ad effectiveness,” Horner said. “If we can work to keep these dataflows as pure, complete and accessible as possible, the ecosystem can better quantify video consumption across linear and digital applications. It is the perfect time to consider practical steps that the industry can take to make the data more comprehensive, accurate, representative, interoperable and cost-effective.” ■

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement said it appointed Tameka Kee as deputy managing director, a new position at the organization.

Kee most recently was director of marketing & communications at Black Innovation Alliance, a non-profit organization. She also held posts at AdMonsters, Wise Public Relations and The Rubicon Project.

In her new post, Kee will work with managing director Jon Watts on membership engagement and consultation, event programming and marketing strategy.

“Over the last year, there have been significant advancements in measurement and currency development, which is hugely encouraging. We’ve expanded our mission and our membership base to embrace a wider remit, encompassing the data enablement of television, new developments in CTV, streaming and programmatic, addressable advertising, new metrics like attention, clean rooms and data infrastructure, and other issues,” said Watts. 

“We’ve also expanded our membership and dramatically expanded our program, to support our members and the wider industry. To continue this momentum in 2023, Tameka is coming onboard, bringing an impressive track record of program leadership across content, marketing and events, and stakeholder management in ad tech. I am confident that she will play a crucial role in supporting CIMM as we continue to grow and develop our program,” Watts said. 

Earlier in her career, Kee founded TJK Media, a content marketing agency that developed campaigns and events for clients such as: eMarketer, Rubicon Project, Lotame, Fyber, Adcolony/Opera Mediaworks and TechMedia. She began her career as a research assistant at Mediaedge:cia

“I began my career in the research division of a media agency, so I think it’s apropos that I’ve joined CIMM -- an organization dedicated to research that uncovers what’s working, what’s not and what some of the possibilities are as it pertains to media measurement,” said Kee. “I’m looking forward to working with Jon, our members and industry partners to develop meaningful programs and initiatives that have a lasting impact.” ■

The Association of National Advertisers, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement and the American Association of National Advertisers said they are launching a study looking at the transition to a multi-currency TV market in the U.S.

A number of programmers are working with media buyers to test using data from measurement companies to buy and sell advertising–a role traditionally played by Nielsen.

But with Nielsen recently problems, including undercounting viewing during the pandemic and losing accreditation from the Media Rating Council, the industry has been more open to looking at alternate currencies from companies including iSpot, VideoAmp, Comscore and 605.

“There are good reasons to be positive about recent developments. CIMM’s members, across the industry, are largely optimistic that this transition will create new opportunities, drive increased investment in measurement offerings, stimulate innovation and facilitate the growth and development of advanced advertising across the market,” said Jon Watts, managing director at CIMM.

“However, there are also important uncertainties about how the transition will work in practice, the implications for planning and buying, and the challenges of navigating across and between different measurement solutions, leading at least some industry participants – including smaller networks, major agency groups and advertisers – to voice concerns. Our goal with this study to identify priorities for industry collaboration and cooperation to support the industry during this transition,” Watts added. 

The study will aim to look at perspectives on what is lacking in TV currency measurement, opportunities, challenges and risks presented by a transition to multiple currencies and steps that different TV networks are taking to support their ad sales, advertising clients and partners with measurement offerings.

It will exampling the levels of confidence of key stakeholders about the ability of the industry to make progress in key areas, the potential impact of the transition on advertiser investment and on the wider TV ad market, the approaches different agency groups are taking to support their clients and to upgrade planning and buying tools and platforms and perspectives on standards and accreditation for currency measurement vendors.

“It has been clear for some time that media and advertising measurement must evolve along with the consumer experience and advanced technology. So, this development for television is not unexpected, but nevertheless challenging. Our goal with this study is to help educate and inform the industry on how to transition from uncertainty to innovation in an increasingly complex transaction environment,” said Nathalie Bores, executive VP of measurement for marketers at the ANA.■

Jon Watts has been named managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement by the Advertising Research Foundation, succeeding Jane Clarke, who plans to retire during the first quarter of 2022.

Clarke has been managing director of CIMM since it was started in 2009.

Watts is co-founder and executive director of The Project X Institute, a media and advertising industry think tank. He was a director of The TV Data Initiative, formed earlier this year.

“There is perhaps no one individual in the industry today more responsible for advancing cross-platform video measurement than Jane,” Scott McDonald, president and CEO of the ARF, said. “Her ability to help buyers, sellers and vendors join together to identify a vision and act upon it, backed by her unique understanding of the technical and business challenges involved, has made it possible for the industry to be near attainment of its ultimate goal. She now leaves that mission in the very experienced and capable hands of Jon.”

CIMM was started by the major TV programmers, media agencies and advertisers. It was acquired by the ARF in 2018. CIMM and Clarke remained vital voices as dissatisfaction with Nielsen grew and the industry looked for alternative ways to measure and analyze viewing.

“I am so grateful to all in the industry who have been deeply committed to CIMM and its mission,” Clarke said. “It is because of their vision, drive, innovation and willingness to work together that so many significant challenges to cross-platform measurement have been overcome. CIMM is a special organization where all segments of the industry can come together to jointly evaluate and spur the development of new technologies and methodologies to ensure they work for the needs of all. I am honored to have helped guide CIMM and immensely proud of what we have achieved.”

Also: CIMM: Attribution Suffers From Inconsistent TV Exposure Data

During Clarke’s tenure, CIMM launched pilot tests of innovative measurement solutions and conducted research to develop best practices and bring transparency and industry confidence to new measurement solutions. CIMM also established a framework for cross-platform video measurement. CIMM’s research focused on improving tools for planning, calculating, and deduplicating reach across platforms. and determining TV attribution.

“It is an honor and a privilege to assume leadership of CIMM from Jane who has been synonymous with the organization and has achieved so much in supporting the industry,” Watts said. “We are at a critical point in that journey, with much change anticipated in the years ahead. I’m looking forward to working with the many different CIMM stakeholders to ensure that we support them and help the industry to make real progress. There’s a huge amount of work to be done and I’m excited to get started.”

While measuring the impact of advertising campaigns has become more important to the television business, the outcomes of attribution studies vary widely because of inconsistent data on commercial exposure, a new report found.

The report, issued by the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement in conjunction with the 4As’ Media Measurement Task Force, looked at 11 TV attribution providers. It found that the accuracy of spot detection, GRPs, reach and frequency measures different from provider to provider. 

“How providers then connect the dots from exposures to outcomes should be their points of difference. If they are all identifying different occurrence levels and evaluating different exposures, then they may as well be evaluating different campaigns,” the report said.

The study calls for better standards when it comes to exposure and reach.

“In order to bring more transparency to attribution and move the industry toward new forms of measurement, we need to understand more about the sources of TV data, how accurate they are and what needs to be worked on,” said Jane Clarke, managing director and CEO, CIMM. “The industry will not be ready for true ad measurement until we have a better way to verify ad logs and can get fully accurate, representative samples.”

The study, conducted by Sequent Partners and Janus Strategy and Insights found that data impacts lift results more than occurrence data and that methodology, rather than underlying technology (set-top boxes versus automated content recognition), drives results. 

In addition to establishing standards, the report recommends that users make sure their occurrence data is validated and that providers test their procedures and be prepared to adopt industry standards as they are developed.

“The importance of attribution to media companies, advertisers and their agencies grow each day,” said Howard Shimmel, president of Janus Strategy and Insights. “The industry is blessed by having so many high quality providers. Our hope is that this report provides a roadmap for providers to improve their offerings and at the same time reduce the dramatic differences between providers.”

The report was presented Wednesday as part of The ARF's AudiencexScience virtual event.

Related > Viewer Watch 2017: Download the Complete Report

Though TV has long been a numbers game, hard data showing changes in the way consumers access video remains a hotly debated subject.

It’s not just that there’s considerable disagreement over how to interpret these changes among executives overseeing what Magna calls the $67 billion TV ad market and PwC describes as the $101 billion subscription pay TV business. There is also much grumbling over the kind of data that is available to answer these multibillion-dollar questions.

“I don’t think we’ve made as much progress as we should have made” in measuring the consumption of video on all platforms and devices, Turner Broadcasting System chief research officer Howard Shimmel said.

There also isn’t much agreement on how the growth in multiplatform video consumption will affect pay TV subscriptions. Some contend that the rise of over-the-top streaming options will sharply reduce the pay TV subscriber ranks; others believe the issue is much more complex.

“From its peak in the first quarter of 2012, the major providers have lost about 1.8 million subscribers,” Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at Leichtman Research Group, said. “The industry is clearly saturated and in a slow decline.”

Interpreting those numbers remains controversial, in part because data on the size of the pay TV universe rests on different assumptions. Leichtman, for example, includes data from services like Sling TV in his company’s estimates, while SNL Kagan does not.

Nielsen also provides different numbers. It reports the number of homes that have TVs connected to a pay TV service, which is different than the number of total pay TV subscribers reported by operators, Nielsen executive vice president of research Glenn Enoch said.

“You have to be very careful about the numbers you use and [about] drawing a straight line from those numbers to revenue, because things are much more complicated than that,” he said.

Related > New Normal: Digital Distribution

CORD-CUTTING CALCULUS

A number of researchers agreed. The proportion of “people dropping pay TV subscriptions is now about 2.6%,” Leichtman noted, which is about the same rate as 10 years ago, when the industry was growing.

“The problem is that the number of new customers has declined,” Leichtman said. “We only see 1% [of homes] moving into pay TV. That is down from 3.5% a decade ago and it has had a real impact on the dynamics of the pay TV industry.”

The declines have been smaller than some had expected, SNL Kagan research director Ian Olgeirson noted. “We are seeing a slight acceleration in the decline in subscribers for multichannel services from a roughly 1% decline in 2015 to a decline of what will probably be 1.3% or 1.4% in 2016,” he said.

The causes of those declines are also hotly debated. “Service providers would say that a lot of those declines are driven by price” and economics, Olgeirson said. But that isn’t the whole story, as the economy has rebounded and housing starts have grown over the past two years, he said.

A recent Frank N. Magid Assoicates survey found that 75% of likely cord-cutters said the ability to watch content via the Internet and OTT platforms was a key reason to drop pay TV service, Magid Advisors president Mike Vorhaus said. Only 29% of respondents cited costs.

Research also challenges the prevailing assumption that pay TV and SVOD services are competing offerings, said Howard Horowitz, president and founder of Horowitz Research, who sees them as complementary to traditional pay TV.

Horowitz survey data shows that 52% of whites and 58% of Hispanics have both a multichannel subscription and a subscription VOD service, while only 5% of whites and 6% of Hispanics have just a SVOD service.

STAGNANT AD SPENDING

Much unease also surrounds the ad market. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst, advertising at Pivotal Research Group, said the economy faces considerable uncertainty over the next year.

“I don’t think anyone can say with any certainty what is going to happen next and that uncertainty is going to curtail advertising,” he said.

National TV ad revenue will drop slightly by 0.4% in 2017 to $44.6 billion, Wieser predicted, and remain essentially flat through 2020, when it will hit $45.2 billion.

Magna’s Letang also sees a weak TV ad market combined with bullish prospects for digital media. “In 2017, we see high single digital inflation [in pricing] but high single-digit declines in ratings,” Letang said. “National TV will be up 1% in 2017 from 2016 if you exclude P&O” — meaning the 2016 revenue from political ads and the Summer Olympics — “and down 1% if you include P&O.”

With political and Olympics spending included, Magna projects that total TV spending will drop by 4.8% to $64.2 billion in 2017, declining further to about $62.2 billion in 2021.

Digital spending, though, will continue to grow rapidly. By 2020, Magna forecasts that mobile advertising will more than double to $78.4 billion (38.2% of all advertising) and social media will hit $31.8 billion in 2020 (a 15.5% share). TV, meanwhile, will slip to a 32.4% share.

Given the uncertainty over the ad market and pay TV subscriptions, programmers and operators have been rethinking their operations.

NEED TO BE NIMBLE

The drive to adapt to new consumer habits has prompted a number of projects to make operations more nimble, Discovery Communications chief technology officer John Honeycutt said.

For example, Discovery’s recently deployed “On Ramp” project allows about 80% of the content produced by 600 production suppliers to be uploaded to the Amazon cloud, where it can be immediately available to Discovery employees and channels all around the world.

“Going from 0% to 80% makes us so much more flexible and efficient,” Honeycutt said.

Equally dramatic upgrades are occurring in the pay TV infrastructure. After ticking off a long list of new products and initiatives to deliver more content to more devices, Comcast Cable executive vice president, general manager, video and entertainment services Matthew Strauss noted that these efforts are built on major improvements to the MSO’s infrastructure.

“We are rolling out DOCSIS 3.1,” he said. “We are rolling out Gigabit speeds. We are transitioning more and more to all-IP, which will allow us to innovate and deliver more of these newer services.”

Rapid innovation has also become the norm for digital platforms. “In 2016, we launched 30 new products and made hundreds of enhancements on dozens of platforms,” Alex Wellen, senior vice president and chief product officer at CNN, said.

Much remains to be done, particularly in the area of measurement. This year will mark a notable improvement on that front, with Nielsen planning to begin syndicating its Total Content Ratings on March 1.

“But some of the networks have been saying they won’t be ready for Nielsen’s public rollout in March, and it isn’t clear if everything will be ready in time for the upfronts,” Jane Clarke, CEO and managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), said. “It is a very complex process to get it implemented in the apps for every kind of player and all the devices.”

Others worry about the TV industry’s ability to maintain its share of ad spending without better data. “Measuring crossplatform video consumption is important, but it is a 2006 problem,” Turner’s Shimmel said. “Today, when we talk to advertisers, what they really care about is outcomes [such as sales] and I don’t see that kind of measurement anywhere in Nielsen or comScore’s future.”

More debates surround commonly held perceptions of the OTT market.

Michael Leszega, senior analyst of market intelligence at Magna, said that “in 2016, we have [more than] 25 million cord-cutters and cord-nevers,” and that this group will continue to grow. By 2020, he predicted, about 28.6% of all households will be outside the traditional pay TV ecosystem. “It is a sizable portion of the population that can’t be ignored,” he said.

That has prompted a number of companies to develop streaming bundles of channels like Dish Network’s Sling TV, Hulu, Sony’s PlayStation Vue and AT&T’s DirecTV Now.

“If you look at the rumors about Amazon or YouTube coming out with OTT bundles, there could be a whole bunch of them, maybe seven or eight by the end of 2017,” Steve Shannon, general manager of content and services at Roku, said.

Tony Goncalves, senior vice president of strategy and business development for AT&T Entertainment Group, described DirecTV Now “as a mobile-first-centric platform” that will deliver the kind of advanced digital features consumers expect from their mobile apps.

“DirecTV Now is pay TV as an app and it opens up a market that has not historically been addressed by pay TV,” he said.

Dish Network also sees great promise in the melding of pay TV packages, OTT delivery and app experiences, Niraj Desai, the company’s vice president of product management, said.

“TV is becoming an app,” he said. “We have been talking about that trend for a while, but 2016 was really the year TV as an app came into its own” with better TV everywhere offerings and the streaming OTT bundles such as Dish’s Sling TV and DirecTV Now.

COMPLEMENTARY PLAYS

Even better, these products open up new markets and are not designed to cannibalize traditional pay TV offerings, he added. “Sling is complementary to DBS,” he said, meaning Dish and DirecTV’s satellite-TV platforms. “Sling over-indexes with urban millennials and DBS resonates with suburban and more rural customers that are more traditional TV watchers.”

Similar views come from programmers that have aggressively targeted consumers without traditional multichannel TV subscriptions.

“We launched HBO Now with the theory that its subscribers were going to look very different from the traditional subscribers,” Bernadette Aulestia, executive vice president of worldwide distribution at HBO, said of the premium programmer’s standalone app.

HBO Now subscribers are 10 years younger than customers of HBO’s premium cable network and typically live in broadband-only households, she said.

“We look at it as an entry point to customers that are coming into the category,” Aulestia said.

The growing popularity of skinny bundles and streaming OTT offerings has also helped HBO’s premium pay TV business, she added.

“There was a time, as a premium service, that we were only sold at the top of the bundle,” Aulestia said. “The idea that HBO should be sold at every level of the bundle, and even as a standalone service, means there are fewer barriers to get HBO.”

The rise of OTT and skinny bundles has been more worrying for ad-supported networks.

“Getting more creative packaging of content to create more customized solutions for the consumer can be very challenging for content providers because you have increasingly fragmented audiences,” Joe Atkinson, technology, infocomm, entertainment and media advisory leader at consultancy PwC, said.

Atkinson and others said OTT distribution can also open up a number of new opportunities.

For instance, the growing SVOD market encouraged Turner’s recent launch of an OTT movie service called FilmStruck, Coleman Breland, president of Turner Content Distribution and president of TCM, said.

“As the bundle became tighter, we decided to go direct to consumer instead of trying to launch a linear network and push it through the ecosystem,” which would be difficult in the current pay TV environment, he said.

Turner has also been pushing to expand the content made available on all platforms both in terms of reach and quantity, with the addition of offerings like full seasons on-demand.

“We now have 450 affiliate partners for our TV everywhere products” and have seen usage jump by “triple digits” in the last year, Breland said.

TIME TO TARGET

Many of these newer products can be traced to a more fundamental change in the way operators think about their customers.

“Today, service providers have to figure out how to target different individuals in household,” PwC’s Atkinson said. “That is a tough challenge, but I think it is really the keys to the kingdom.”

One example of such a targeting effort is the development of packages targeted to consumers at different life stages. “College students have different needs than a single-family home with kids, and we are very focused on meeting all those different needs,” Comcast’s Strauss said. He said the Xfinity on Campus product has been a success in that regard.

Operators have also been greatly expanding the content sources via apps on Internet connected set-top devices such as Dish Network’s Hopper. “You can watch live TV with your Dish subscription, or recorded TV on your DVR or you can watch Netflix and YouTube all in one convenient place,” Dish’s Desai said.

Adding more choices has also been a top priority for Cox Communications, Steve Necessary, executive vice president of product development and management at the Atlanta-based cable operator, said. “We have more than doubled our VOD offerings from 50,000 to over 120,000,” he said.

Cox also has revamped its TV app to expand the content available on digital devices and speeded up the rollout of Contour — Cox’s version of the Comcast X1 Internet-connected set-top platform — from 3,000 customers to more than 600,000 in 2016.

Very importantly, such efforts are also beginning to pay off. Both Comcast and Cox are seeing some of their best video-subscriber efforts in a decade.

Programmers are also reporting strong gains from their digital platforms.

“There is a blending of content types and expansion of the platforms,” translating into some record-setting numbers, ESPN vice president of digital media research and analytics Dave Coletti said.

In year when some live sports audiences have declined, Coletti noted that Watch ESPN’s live stream of the Nov. 26 college-football game between third-ranked Michigan and second-ranked Ohio State — which went into double overtime before OSU prevailed, 30-27 — tallied 1,273,000 unique viewers, making it ESPN’s most streamed regular college football game. (The game telecast also aired on ABC.)

“Eight of our top 10 most-streamed regular season college football games have occurred this year,” he noted.

The 2016 presidential election helped CNN set a number of network records, Wellen said, including a record audience level on Nov. 9 with 77 million unique users, 83 million video starts, 483 million page views and 29 million live streams.

Equally notable was social media. CNN racked up 169.7 million video views on Facebook and 47.6 million Facebook Live views, he said.

“Those results show that it has become very important to be both a destination for content and a distributed brand,” he said. “We have apps and websites where people can access our content but, we’ve also seen that we can be very successful on Facebook Live” and other outside platforms.

Additional encouraging news can be found in TV use, Nielsen’s Enoch said. “The decreases that we saw in TV usage that really started to accelerate in the mid-2014 have lessened,” he said. “TV consumption remains at near record level.”

“We are also seeing a shift back to the more traditional way of hooking up a TV” to a pay TV service or an antenna, he added. “The universe of homes that can watch TV or can stream video to the big screen has actually grown,” reversing a trend that began with the digital transition and the 2008 recession.

That said, Enoch said the “fastest growing area of overall usage — not just video — is the smartphone.”

In the second quarter of 2016, Nielsen reports that consumers ages 18-34 spent almost as much time each week with their smartphones (14 hours and 36 minutes) and tablets (three hours and 27 minutes) as they did with traditional TV (18 hours and 27 minutes).

Less discussed but equally important are connected TVs. “TVs connected to the Internet by any device have grown from about one-quarter of all households in 2010 to about two-thirds of all households,” Leichtman said. “There are now more connected TV devices in American than there are pay TV set-top boxes.”

Said CBS Interactive president and chief operating officer Marc DeBevoise, “We are seeing explosive usage in those connected TV experiences.” He added that “time spent on connected TVs with our products has grown by more than 300%.”

As an illustration, consumers in October of 2016 spent about 347 minutes per month consuming CBS news content via desktop computers, compared with 360 minutes via Apple TV and 496 minutes via Roku, per unique viewer, DeBevoise noted.

“That is a lot of usage, and we are spending a lot of time making certain we can capitalize on that by getting those experiences right,” he added.

LINES ARE BLURRING

Connected TVs also offer much more advanced capabilities for search and discovery. For example, the Roku platform allows users to search for TV shows and movies across more than 100 apps, Roku general manager of content and services Steve Shannon said.

Advanced features are helping to blur the line between connected devices, pay TV operators and the new bundles of streaming channels.

Companies such as Hulu and Sling are increasingly bundling their subscription packages of channels with a free Roku, Shannon said. Also, Charter, Comcast and a number of other operators have either launched or plan to launch TV everywhere apps on the Roku platform so that subscribers can access a large bouquet of channels on the pay TV apps, he said.

“You have the normalization of OTT, where you are seeing massive amounts of traditional broadcast style content viewing on OTT platforms,” Shannon said.

The FCC’s proposal to open cable set-top boxes to competition has thrust them into the spotlight as relates to the cost they place upon consumers and the innovation that competition from non-MVPD providers could bring.

But they are also rising in importance because of another discussion that is of perhaps greater relevance to the industry. That is the role that STBs play not as content portals, but as providers of return-path data (RPD).

From their inception, set-tops have had the potential to supply second-by-second viewing data captured passively – providing a level of granular insight into viewing behavior that was not before possible. And while not all MVPDs have made their data available, the availability of this data set from those that did has transformed audience measurement and has begun to lay the framework for audience-based buying, improved ad ROI measurement, addressable advertising services and, ultimately, scalable cross-platform measurement.

More recently, the emergence of smart TVs provided an alternative to set-tops as a source of second-by-second viewing, with some significant differences.

Unlike STBs, smart TVs can tell when a television set is on or off. STBs know only when the box itself has been turned off, not the TV. Therefore the potential exists to record content as being viewed when a set has been turned off but the STB remains on. To counter this, STB data providers use cap and edit rules that enable them to determine for specific types of content after what period of uninterrupted “viewing” the data should be cut off.

Smart TVs can also capture all television usage, including SVOD and digital games, while STBs can only measure linear television or what is passing through the box.

Smart TVs can also capture over-the-air (OTA) households, which obviously STBs cannot. While it may be a small set of viewers who have broadband Internet access but still view TV OTA, it offers a view into these households.

But while Smart TVs indeed have certain advantages for audience measurement as compared to STBs, they have shortcomings as well.

First and foremost, no Smart TV manufacturer is fully representative of the entire U.S., so there is no national footprint. And while not all MVPDs provide their STB data and therefore are not fully representative of the U.S. either, there is a large enough supply of data available from those providing data to cover perhaps 40% to 50% of the country.

STBs provide another distinct advantage in that they usually are connected to most, if not all, the television sets in a household, while at this point there is typically only one smart TV per household that has been connected to the Internet. Therefore, full household viewing behavior in these households may go uncaptured.

These comparisons and contrasts have inevitably led to the debate over which data set is of greater value to broadcasters and advertisers – RPD from STBs or from smart TVs?

But the reality is that the differences between the two types of data clearly demonstrate that their greater value lies in being complementary data sets, rather than competitive, and efforts should be made to determine how we can best combine them for a much more comprehensive and valuable approach to audience measurement.

The challenge in doing so is not insignificant and also not without concerns. The primary among these is how do we combine these data sets and protect viewer data privacy?

What would need to be done is to find some way to aggregate all viewers who have explicitly opted in to provide data, and work to have their data anonymized so that there was no way in which a user could get back to any individual viewer’s PPI. 

As has been demonstrated before with integrated data sets, a third-party provider for aggregating the data in this manner would in all probability be the best way to go.

The need for second-by-second viewing data across the spectrum of television content and collected on a scaled nationally representative basis is critical to the advancement of vital industry initiatives ranging from audience based buying to greater understanding of ROI and development of effective cross-platform measurement of both content and ads.

Set-tops and smart TVs each provide important data sets for the advancement of these objectives, but clearly they can be more effective in doing so collectively than competitively.

CIMM, under its mission of advancing cross-platform measurement, is launching an initiative to identify potential partners to combine smart TV and STB data in a manner that would protect viewer privacy while complementing the strengths and weaknesses of both methods.

We believe that through this initiative, data from MVPDs' set-tops and smart TVs, as well as data from what other STBs might come along from new providers, will work in concert together, providing a much more complete picture of national television viewing and fulfilling the promise of advanced audience measurement.

Jane Clarke is CEO and managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM).

While the dust continues to settle over last week’s announcement of the proposed merger between comScore and Rentrak, one consensus sentiment has risen above the rest — competition is good.

And competition, especially as it relates to the challenging field of crossplatform audience measurement, is very good.

CIMM (the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) is supportive of the proposed merger because the competition it will bring to the audience- measurement industry will fuel innovations and new approaches. That is what competition always helps spur.

For example, comScore has already launched a version 1.0 X-Media service, and now Nielsen is launching one of its own. Both will need improvements as users test them out, but competition will ensure that over time these improvements will take place.

BREEDING COMPLACENCY

Certainly, in an environment where patterns of content consumption are evolving faster than we as an industry can develop methods to measure them, the reality of relying upon one or even two main measurement providers is not healthy for anyone — not even the providers. This level of market dominance inevitably leads to complacency simply because the economic incentive for taking chances and innovating is not there. The risk is too great, and the reward too small.

That, to a great extent, is why CIMM was founded — to serve as the industry’s research-and-development arm, fueling innovation in cross-platform measurement technologies as a counterbalance to what was seen as the slow pace of innovation.

Competition is only part of the problem, though, and compensating for the lack of it was only one reason why CIMM came to be. The other is a more important “c” word — cooperation.

Just as the most effective drug therapy will be of no use unless a patient complies with its administration, so, too, the most innovative technologies and approaches will be of little impact unless we collectively as an industry work together to effectively implement them.

Because just as there is a degree of complacency in innovation that occurs in a market dominated by a handful of players, there is also a complacency that develops among customers. The pull to favor what one already knows, even if it is not perfect, can be strong. It is often easier to just not rock the boat.

And that can certainly hold back the industry’s overall desire and ability to innovate and embrace change.

COMPETITION AND CONSENSUS

Competition, too, as helpful as it is to innovation, can be endemic to cooperation. There is the risk of ending up with a highly fractured approach to crossplatform measurement with no consensus as to what an acceptable metric is.

That is not to suggest we should desire competition to result in yet just another single source dominated measurement environment, but simply that broad industry conversation and cooperation is needed to help contribute, guide and direct the shape that crossplatform measurement is to take.

Certainly, those who do not participate in the conversation — who fall susceptible to complacency — will have no opportunity to change things after the fact.

And while competition, and the innovative technology it brings, will fuel the drive to more effective crossplatform measurement, it will be the human element, realized through conversation and cooperation, that will make it a reality.

That is really why CIMM was founded, to serve as a nexus for buyers and sellers to discuss and work together, and we are pleased to continue to serve in that role in the exciting days ahead as both the combined comScore and Rentrak take shape and our other initiatives in crossplatform measurement come to fruition.

Jane Clarke is CEO and managing director of CIMM, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement. For more information, visit www.cimm-us.org