The rapid diversification of content consumption across platforms has outpaced the ability of the audience measurement industry to accurately capture and quantify it. But efforts to narrow that gap are accelerating.

From the upcoming merger of comScore and Rentrak to the introduction of Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement, and from Comcast’s use of its set-top box data for new products to the emergence of Samba.TV, the urgent need to better understand and measure how content is being consumed is driving innovation like never before.

But beyond the availability of more granular data and better targeting capabilities, what will the evolution of audience measurement mean to our industry and what, if anything, should you be doing today to prepare?

The natural inclination to sit back and wait till the dust settles is understandable – but it runs the risk of having the dust settle on you. As an organization that represents the needs of both the buyers and sellers of advertising, and as a catalyst to new measurement research initiatives, CIMM is an advocate for encouraging end users of media measurement to be active in pushing for new solutions.

So, to ensure that audience measurement as it develops uniquely benefits you and that you are best prepared to take advantage of it as it evolves, here’s what you need to do now.

(1) Stay Informed

It’s easy to view the audience measurement development scrum as akin to the type of wonkish policy debates that take place in the halls of government. But just as policy decisions can leave you scrambling once they are made, so, too, might audience measurement technology development leave you playing catch-up once a clear direction is defined.

There will be no bell that rings when audience measurement technology is “developed.” This will be a rolling process, with critical insights – and probably many assumption-busting revelations – along the way. You need to keep apprised of these so that you can begin to consider what, if any,adjustments to the marketing mix need to be made as cross-platform consumption “truths” are revealed. The risk of not doing so is to constantly play from behind.

(2) Get Involved

What are the unique insight and measurement needs you require to better understand your audience’s content consumption patterns? Don’t assume that the various entities involved in development have your needs covered. The only way to assure that is to speak up and work with the various measurement companies and associations to share the unique experience and appreciation you have for your specific target audience.

(3) Prepare for Change

While the future course of audience measurement may not yet be known, undoubtedly it will bring about some very new and surprising insights about viewer behavior, challenging long-held beliefs. Often times, such closely held beliefs can hinder the ability to see emerging indications of new behavior patterns. Similarly, well established ways of doing things can inhibit technology adaptation.

Begin to foster a culture that embraces and can facilitate change, because much of what we know and how we approach it will be challenged as true cross-platform measurement emerges.

(4) Open Lines of Communication

The relationship between advertisers and media sellers is changing. As audience measurement becomes more granular and complete – identifying individuals as well as households and accounting for more and more unduplicated viewers – the way publishers structure and charge for access to those audiences will evolve.

To ensure that such future arrangements are beneficial to both parties, it is best for media buyers and sellers to engage now in a dialogue where forward-looking assumptions and possibilities are opened for input, debated and at least understood.

(5) Embrace Openness

For truly effective cross-platform measurement to take place, a degree of standardization, cooperation and openness will need to occur. Whether it be an open standard for identifying video content and ads, or the need for common metrics to make comparisons of exposure across platforms, the future of audience measurement will be about openness and cooperation.

For an industry that is highly competitive, cooperation does not come easily, but the most effective technologies and methodologies will never work if there is not cooperation. Those companies that can understand cooperation and openness will thrive in the future of audience measurement, so best now to foster that type of culture.

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

While Nielsen ratings remain the central currency for measuring TV audiences, the process of gathering second-by-second data from millions of set-top boxes has rapidly become an alternative option that can help programmers and their advertisers learn much more about their viewers — and target them.

There’s no shortage of companies that have access to this massive flow of raw data and sift through it all to find these valuable nuggets of information, among them FourthWall Media, AT&T’s AdWorks unit and Rentrak.

Going beyond sex and age demographics, set-top data can dive several layers deeper to help ad buyers target their products more precisely and bring a digital-style approach to TV advertising.

Among this group, FourthWall collects box data from about 2.1 million homes (and roughly 4 million set-top boxes) across 90 demographic market areas.

As with other companies that collect such information, it’s all kept anonymous, but Fourth- Wall does use unique household identifiers to provide a full picture of how those homes change over time. With that data in hand, it is then free to layer it with demographic information from sources such as Acxiom. The company’s information is also used by outfits such as AOL’s Adap.tv, a unit that specializes in automated programmatic advertising online and, increasingly, for TV, and Starcom Mediavest, which taps in to make smarter media buys.

“We help a lot of companies facilitate their particular services,” Bill Feininger, president of FourthWall’s MassiveData division, said.

Feininger said he views FourthWall as both complementary and competitive to Nielsen, where he was previously employed for about 16 years. “We don’t build products that are measured products that compete with them. But on the other hand, we certainly have the data that could be used for that purpose.”

FourthWall also has the ability to collect similar data from mobile devices, which will grow in importance as TV Everywhere and other over-the-top services continue to attract eyeballs.

FourthWall’s “plumbing” has the ability to do that kind of collection. “We don’t implement that for ourselves and collect [that data], but the pieces are in place for our partners that license that technology,” Feininger said.

Rentrak, meanwhile, has a movie business that measures every time a movie ticket is sold in real time on a census basus. That information helps studios plan and shift their TV and digital media strategies practically on the fly. At the behest of programmers, it followed that years ago by measuring set-top box data as it became clear that video-on-demand would become an important extension of movie consumption. It went even further as on-demand viewing of TV shows became popular.

Rentrak now gathers information from 115 million TV sets, and, out of those VOD homes with a return path, is also measuring a subset of about 30 million, taking a look at live TV, DVR and VOD viewing, said vice chairman and CEO Bill Livek.

That kind of information enables Rentrak to precisely define who’s watching a TV show and who might also be BMW or Audi owner, and consumers “who have a propensity to buy brands when it comes to the products inside a grocery store,” Livek said.

Tapping big databases against TV viewing “helps the ad agencies and the brands become more efficient,” Livek said.

Rentrak, like FourthWall, is also keeping tabs on TV viewing on mobile devices.

“It’s still a tiny piece of the puzzle,” Livek said, noting that Rentrak is presently looking at that kind of data on a proprietary basis, “but soon it will be syndicated.”

In a similar vein, AT&T AdWorks is helping its partners tap set-top box data, poring through data generated from more than 16 million boxes across the U-verse TV universe.

There’s been a “big shift” as advertisers become increasingly interested in using digital- style methods that bring more accountability to TV advertising and are far more effective than traditional linear TV buys, Maria Mandel Dunsche, vice president of marketing at AT&T AdWorks, said.

Interest in those models is now attracting “some serious dollars,” she said, noting that the process is enabling a “digital currency to move to the TV” ecosystem.

“The set-top box can be a powerful [tool] to model potential new ways to reach a more targeted audience,” she said.

Looking ahead, AT&T Ad Works expects to expand its current TV-focused capabilities with mobile, a move that could help the company target and measure advertising across platforms. AT&T expects to announce more details later this year.

FourthWall Media has entered a partnership arrangement with Starcom MediaVest Group giving the media planning and buying agency access to FourthWall’s set-top box viewership data as a means of more closely matching advertisers to the viewers interested in them.

SMG will integrate FourthWall’s anonymous, non-aggregated granular datasets with the agency’s proprietary planning and buying platform, dubbed TARDIIS, as well as its multi-touch attribution analytics platform. The integration will enable SMG’s clients to create more precisely targeted campaigns and maximize their media buying budgets, the agency said.

The two companies have also brought in data aggregator Axciom, which has prior relationships with both, to ensure compliance with digital privacy regulations via its Safe Haven program. Safe Haven matches first-party data, advertiser data and other partners’ data, scrubbing out anything that personally identifies end users (i.e., viewers) and replacing it with a generic but unique ID to use in multiple marketing applications. (Watch a video about the Safe Haven program here.)

Bill Feininger, president of FourthWall’s MassiveData division, said SMG is the first agency to have access to its granular viewership data, which it collects from all TV channels on a second-by-second basis via technology embedded in millions of set-top boxes. The company, based in Dulles, Va., provides its technology platform for use in Cisco, Motorola, Pace and tru2way set-top boxes, and its products are in use by a broad range of U.S. cable operators.

“Being able to anonymously match set-top viewing data with target audience lists creates more precise targeting of television advertising,” Feininger said. “We can do this in a privacy-compliant fashion using Acxiom to match target audiences with their television viewing activity.”

The three-way partnership aims to enable expanded analytics that SMG can make available to its clients.

"As a longtime believer in the power of set-top box data to transform TV, it is very exciting to have this kind of access to large-scale, granular data that can help our clients more precisely plan, place and optimize media," Lisa Weinstein, president of SMG’s Global Digital, Data & Analytics unit, said.

FourthWall, a provider of cable set-top box viewing data, said the U.S. Patent office has approved a patent for its Velox bandwidth management and optimization technologies: Network Bandwidth Regulation Using Traffic Scheduling. 

Velox, the vendor said, makes second-by-second data collection possible on the full range of set-top boxes deployed by U.S. cable operator, and takes care of two critical functions in data transmission in the cable network infrastructure: guaranteed data delivery and bandwidth management.

FourthWall said those elements are particularly important in environments where the return data path is a valuable and scarce resource as it’s shared by other system components and applications. Velox, the vendor said, guarantees the data transmission within this network, overcoming some of the shortcomings of the less reliable UDP (User Datagram Protocol) transmission, and uses predictive scheduling and coordination to regulate and optimize bandwidth use on the limited upstream return channel while preventing dangerous bandwidth spikes.

“With the volume of data sent from the set-top box including viewership data and diagnostic information, Velox is a critical technology in collecting this information in a timely, reliable manner. The result is a complete, usable dataset that can benefit all television stakeholders,” said FourthWall chief scientist and co-founder Dr. Louis Slothouber, in a statement.