Fox Corp. said it made a deal with Innovid to measure cross-platform TV viewership across the Fox portfolio.

The InnovidXP measurement system is part of Fox’s efforts to find new ways to quantify ad delivery, impact and performance. 

The deal comes at a time when media companies are looking for alternatives to historic industry leader Nielsen to count and analyze viewers in a more complex TV environment.

“As more viewers engage with content across multiple screens, it remains vital that we continue to work with our ad partners and provide them with the necessary data and insights that further display the value of converged TV and the engaged audiences and concentrated impact Fox delivers,” Fox senior VP, data strategy and sales innovation Dan Callahan said. “Our partnership with Innovid is another step forward in expanding and delivering cross-platform measurement solutions that further align with our advertisers’ objectives.”

The agreement is also an expansion of the work Innovid started last year with Tubi, Fox’s ad-supported streaming service.

Also: Tubi Expands Nielsen Ratings Coverage to Additional Devices

“For more than a year, Tubi has been working in lockstep with Innovid to quantify the unique reach that streaming delivers to advertisers beyond linear — providing Top TV advertisers with actionable insights,”  Tyler Fitch, senior VP, advanced TV and partnerships at Tubi, said. “Tubi and Fox have a shared vision to create the optimal environment for advertisers to efficiently reach the right audiences across multiple platforms and screens. InnovidXP brings this vision to life with consistent, accurate and scalable cross-platform TV measurement.” 

InnovidXP generates cross-platform viewership from a combination of household-level data from smart TVs, automatic content recognition and connected TV ad impressions. 

Fox will look to InnovidXP to determine a deduplicated view of audiences across platforms, highlighting how advertisers can reach wider audiences with campaigns that use both Fox and Tubi. Fox said it has found that on average 80% of Tubi households are unreachable by linear TV and that brands that add Tubi to Fox linear campaign reach audiences that are 75% incremental.

“Fox and Tubi are redefining the way advertisers approach TV investments by prioritizing analytics that prove the value of converged TV,” InnovidXP president Jo Kinsella said. “We are thrilled to support this collaborative effort to unite linear and streaming with cross-platform audience measurement and look forward to delivering advertisers the insights and metrics that matter today.” ■

Nielsen and Roku said they will enable deduplicated audience measurement across traditional TV, connected TV, desktop video and mobile, letting marketers calculate reach and frequency for multiscreen campaigns.

Advertisers are shifting money to connected TV as streaming adds audience share. But media buyers complain that remains difficult to measure CTV, determine how many unique viewers they are reaching and know how frequently each viewer is seeing their commercials.

Also: Streaming's Share of TV Viewing Tops Cable for First Time: Nielsen

“Marketers are increasingly investing in CTV to follow consumers. However, brands want consistent measurement across screens,” Nielsen senior VP, product management Kim Gilberti said. “Marketers can now better evaluate CTV inventory’s unique reach and frequency in conjunction with their entire Roku buy in a comparable and comprehensive manner, and advertisers can reduce waste and help ensure that relevant ads are delivered to the right audiences across devices. This release brings us one step closer to providing comparable and deduplicated metrics across screens with Nielsen One.”

Roku and NIelsen previously announced that Roku would be providing audience measurement through Nielsen Total Ad Ratings on Roku’s One View platform. The new capability will be available in Nielsen Ad Ratings and will be a key part of Nielsen One, the new multiscreen measurement system expected to be released in December.

“We believe that all TV ads will be accountable and measurable,” Roku head of ad measurement and research Asaf Davidov said. “Our direct consumer relationship, our scale, and our tech all make us uniquely positioned to work with Nielsen to make measurement simpler and more accurate as marketers shift spend to TV streaming.” ■

iSpot said it can now  provide media buyers and advertisers with the age and sex demographic information used for transactions in addition to its measurement of cross-screen audiences and business outcomes.

Co-viewing information is also part of iSpot’s new capabilities.

While media planners are increasing building campaigns based on specific target audiences--such as truck buyers--most deals are still done based on which age bracket the viewers are in and whether they’re male or female.

Related: iSpot Measuring Addressable ads under Project OAR Specs

Being able to apply the same age and demo information used for buying linear to the fast-growing connected TV ad market should help media buyers shift dollars to CTV, according to iSpot CEO Sean Muller.

Related: Nielsen Sets Major Changes in Program, Ad Measurement

Ratings leader Nielsen this week announced its plan to offer a unified ratings system called Nielsen One that offers cross-platform ratings for content and impress-level date for individual commercials. Nielsen will roll out its product in the fourth quarter of 2022.

iSpot gets household viewing information from a large-scale panel of millions of Vizio smart sets. It’s using data from Epsilon to identify who is in particular households and is working with TVision to figure out which member of the household is watching programming on a particular device.

As more consumers stream video content, the ad industry is looking for comparable ways to measure over-the-top viewing and traditional linear TV. 

“We’ve been doing unified cross-screen measurement for years,” said Muller. “Really what’s new right now is the introduction of person level measurement across both linear and streaming.”

Muller noted that ads on both linear TV and streaming are still bought based on age and gender demographics. 

“What the industry needs is one simple system that can count all that across linear and streaming using the traditional age and gender system, but then connecting it to outcomes,” he said. “That’s what iSpot’s able to do that nobody else can do today.”

Most of the spending on connected TV and streaming is coming from TV budgets and TV buyers and not from digital ad budgets. With linear ratings down, advertisers are looking to follow consumers to streaming platforms. “That is why this release is so critical for dollars to flow between linear and CTV,” Muller said.

The person-level reporting is integrated into iSpot’s measurement offering inside the platforms of measurement partners such as The Trade Desk, which brands can purchase with campaigns on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis to verify the incremental reach provided by CTV investments across TTD’s portfolio. The measurement capability also is powering TV ad insights for Neustar, Oracle’s Moat, OpenAP and  Cox Media’s Gamut. 

Related: Apollo's Gamut to Use iSpot Unified Measurement

“Because we were using measurements that spanned OTT and linear, we could analyze how responses compared side-by-side,” said Diana Boyles, VP of marketing at HomeAdvisor, which has used iSpot's new capabilities. “We learned that when someone sees a linear and OTT ad, there is a greater likelihood of responding. Moreover, we saw that people exposed only to OTT ads were very likely to convert. We were able to prove that we were reaching a net new audience for our brand that was performing very well. Last year we tested seven new streaming partners using iSpot Unified Measurement, and ended up more than doubling our spend on streaming.”

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

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

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

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

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

The 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).

RELATED:Heads Up! Attentiveness Is the New TV Metric [subscription required]

Comparing traditional TV with digital has long been tricky. While data about digital seems more direct and accurate, measurements like unique users and minutes viewed are like oranges compared to TV's audience of apples.

While measurement companies Nielsen and comScore compete to construct a cross-platform ratings regime that works, the Video Advertising Bureau, which represents broadcast and cable TV, has come up with a formula it says provides an accurate snapshot of the number of people using TV versus those using Facebook.

The VAB’s solution is to measure average audience per minute, which takes into account reach, frequency and time spent, the factors that are important to advertisers. The VAB multiplies unique audience by average minutes viewed per visitor to get total minutes viewed. Then it divides by total minutes in the time period to get an average audience.

Using this formula, the VAB said, TV’s audience in any minute averages 45.4 million people, topping 12.7 million for smartphones and 9 million for PCs.

Television accounts for 95% of video consumption among adults and 88% among those pesky, cord-cutting millennials. TV as a whole beats Facebook 7 to 1, Pandora 15 to 1 and YouTube 15 to 1 among adults, according to the VAB.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

comScore, moving into the TV market, said that the amount of time viewers spent watching was up 7% in fourth-quarter 2015.

comScore’s 2015 Cross-Platform Future in Focus report said that in viewing households, 1,004 hours were spent watching live TV, up from 936 hours a year ago. Time spent watching programs on DVRs up to 15 days after they originally aired also rose, to 356 hours from 332 hours.

“The availability of more viewing options appealing to a wider array of tastes, in addition to the continued expansion of premium, original, scripted programming on cable networks, has likely contributed to this effect,” the comScore report said.

Earlier this year, comScore, which specialized in measuring Web usage, acquired Rentrak, which uses set-top box data to gauge TV viewing.

Among millennials, time spent viewing live TV has been eclipsed by use of desktop computers and mobile devices. Live TV still accounts for 47% of time spent.

“It’s possible that digital share of time spent among 25-54 year-olds might also soon surpass live TV," the report said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.