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New York -- “I think that 2017 is going to be the year of first-party measurement,” Joan FitzGerald, vice president of product management and business development at TiVo, said during an audience-measurement panel Wednesday (Oct. 19) at the Advanced Advertising conference, commenting that that might be a controversial statement.

It might have been in the sense that the biggest player in third-party TV viewing measurement, Nielsen, was represented on the panel in the form of Andrew Feigenson, managing director, digital. But on the same panel Randy Cooke, VP of programmatic at SpotX, had declared he believed “the future of ad decisioning resides in first-party data.” Cooke, though, also endorsed the importance of a “trusted industry support standard” to evaluate whether or not an ad buy you just made was priced correctly.

FitzGerald’s point was that advertisers have been building their own databases – including visitors to their own websites – and attaching it to third-party data sources from the likes of Nielsen or set-top data from Comscore (which acquired Rentrak) instead of relying more heavily on what comes from third parties. “This experimentation is going to become more mainstream” going forward, she said.

The panel, part of NYC Television and Video Week, also featured Colleen Fahey Rush, executive VP and chief research officer at Viacom, who said the "trust and transparency" role of third-party measurement in TV was underscored by recent news of video views exaggerated by “people grading their own homework.” She wouldn’t name the company when asked to elaborate by moderator Dade Hayes, the editor of Broadcasting & Cable, but the allusion seemed to be about Facebook’s admission that it had accidentally overstated the number of viewers for videos on the site (a situation Facebook said had been fixed and did not result in overbilling to clients).

Rush went on to say the Viacom Vantage data-driven ad product, announced in 2015, had been resonating with ad buyers and growing. Viacom Vantage, she said, “is really all about harnessing all kinds of different kinds of data sets so that we can really work with the advertiser and agency to define the segment together and deliver impressions and reach and their guaranteed target.”

Feigenson agreed that first-party data use was on the rise but used, as an example, Travelocity. That online travel provider has a huge amount of data from its own transactions, but that doesn’t represent the entire travel industry.

Movie studios, he also said, used to have relatively easy choices to make when they wanted to promote an upcoming theatrical release: buy mass audience reach using gross ratings points. Audiences are more fragmented now, though, and buying network TV won’t reach the millions of viewers tuned to Netflix or other streaming sources. “There are so many options right now that I think for a marketer it’s absolutely baffling,” he said.

“The baseline has to be reach and frequency to start with,” Feigenson, and then layer on other more targeted approaches. Nielsen, of course, is hard at work on generating "Total Audience Measurement" that will include online viewing sources.

Feigenson related a story about a recent meeting with customers in an advisory board and how one of the people at the session needed some extra time to absorb the new data features coming out and remarked, essentially, that what Nielsen was doing was awesome but it was moving too fast.

Hearing "Nielsen and too fast in the same sentence," Feigenson said, was memorable.

A Comscore executive had been scheduled to appear on the panel but was unable to attend, leaving Feigenson as the sole representative of third-party measurement firms on the panel. 

BOSTON—The quest for additional transparency in the modern measurement business will be driven, like most aspects of the TV ad industry, by the amount of money that is being directed toward it, a panel of ad experts said at an INTX Show panel Tuesday.

“The dollars will dictate how this changes,” said comScore executive vice president Cathy Hetzel at the panel session, Getting to Transparency: The Promises and Pitfalls of Modernized Media Measurement. Hetzel added that last year $3 billion of advertising spend went up for renewal and clients want transparency as to where the money is going.

Discovery Communications head of ad sales product strategy and development Keith Kazerman said making sure the data collected is accurate and reliable depends on who is delivering it and what methods are being used.

“Monetizing our investment is incumbent upon us,” Kazerman said. “We need to have a currency that is third-party verified. We should collaborate and work together, programmers distributors, measurement companies to see what standards start to evolve.”

Nielsen senior vice president client solutions Judi Allen said client collaboration is an important part of her company’s Total Audience Measurement products. And she added that clients have to look at data and measurement in general in a different way – moving to a world where shows are measured by the second and ratings periods can be days and even weeks long, requires a different mindset, even about things as simple as how views are counted.

“We want to experience all we can, but getting clients there takes time and effort,” Allen said.

Cablevision Media Sales senior vice president and general manager, advanced data analytics Paul Haddad said that accuracy and accountability also are critical to success.

“We do believe the legacy measurement system for the past six years needs to evolve, it needs to be complemented,” Haddad said, adding that taking responsibility for the lack of measurement or faulty data is just as important as accuracy.

The TV space, although under siege from digital competition, is in a unique position, Allen said, and operators and programmers should step up efforts to drive that point home to advertisers.

“The story is there about the incredible TV experience” Allen said. “There are weaknesses in the existing digital ecosystem.”

Hetzel agreed.

“This is the first year we’re going to see real cross-platform measurement,” Hetzel said. “We have our first reports where we look across unduplicated reach, the first opportunity to be able to understand how consumer are consuming TV. …Transparency is big part of that.”

Content providers take heed – according to TV measurement stalwart Nielsen, the proliferation of digital video recorders, video on demand and digital content have pushed traditional viewing habits out the window, with some shows attracting their biggest gains in audience well beyond the traditional seven-days after original air.

In advertising circles, the Live-plus-7-day (L7) rating period is becoming increasingly irrelevant as viewers watch content on a variety of devices at different times.

In a press briefing Tuesday, Nielsen senior vice president of audience insights Glenn Enoch unveiled research from the measurement company’s clients as part of its Total Audience Measurement initiative showing viewership can rise after the L7 window between from 4% to 58% depending on the genre of programming. Enoch said that in the small sample of programming, reality/competition shows fared the worst with 18-49 year-olds in extending viewing, with only a 4% audience gain beyond seven days. The biggest increase came from animated comedy shows, where 58% of the audience lift came between day eight and day 118.

READ MORE: Nielsen dismisses "noise" about total audience delays.

Enoch said that by far the majority of viewing came in the first week after original air – as much as 88% for reality shows. But as viewing habits change, viewers – especially younger viewers – are time-shifting more often and for longer periods of time.

VOD is the primary driver for the extended viewing period, Enoch said. DVR usage drops dramatically after the seventh day after original air, while VOD usage has its greatest lift period after seven days.

VOD watchers are also more engaged: they watch an average of 30 minutes while those who view live TV watch an average of 15 minutes, according to Nielsen.

Nielsen began making its Total Audience Measurement products available to a select number of clients in January, who have been evaluating the data.

Senior vice president of product leadership Kelly Abcarian said Nielsen’s total audience offering will be more widely available in the third quarter of this year.

“This enables them to understand how that audience builds across time,” Abcarian said. “So the networks and the broadcasters and the content owners can have more firepower to talk about how their audience looks across time so they can better positon and plan and sell that out to advertisers. Secondly, the advertisers want to access younger audiences, they want access to more available inventory. That’s what this data set enables them to understand across both the buy and sell side.”

READ MORE: Five ways to prepare for the audience measurement revolution.

One thing that content providers can take from the data is that it may behoove them to make full current seasons of their shows available on demand to distributors to take full advantage of viewership trends.

Abcarian said that while some of the content showed no VOD viewing at all, that wasn’t because viewers didn’t want to watch the show on demand, but that it wasn’t available on demand.

“I think this data will give them much better insights around how to make the content available but even more importantly how to monetize that content with the advertisers,” Abcarian said.  

Nielsen has been conducting client advisory boards, where companies who have been evaluating the data meet regularly to talk about their findings and new uses for the data. Jessica Hogue, also a senior vice present of product leadership at Nielsen, said the level of cooperation has been encouraging.

“We’re really quite pleased with the level of engagement we have across all aspects of our program,” Hogue said. “We have many clients that are ready for evaluation and are starting to look at that data already today. We continue to grow our pipeline of clients that are integrating for VOD and digital measurement across the board. We think that will continue to grow because our clients are continuing to evolve the way they distribute their content.”

Total audience measurement — a term that comprises viewing for TVs, tablets, PCs and phones — is finally making its debut in the next several months, with offerings from both Nielsen and the newly combined comScore-Rentrak aimed at tracking viewership across multiple devices and platforms.

While the new measurement products are expected to provide some much-needed insight into changing viewing habits, they also raise a deeper question. As viewers sit in the family room with their big-screen TVs blazing, tapping text messages on their phones and checking websites and social-media platforms on their laptops and tablets, what attracts their attention most?

The TV industry is awash in viewing data at the moment, but the real challenge for programmers — and advertisers — is to find the right data to mine from viewers.

Total audience measurement, once just a pipe dream for many advertisers and networks, is, to an extent, already here. Nielsen made its Total Audience Measurement product available to select clients in a beta-testing mode earlier this year, and is expected to make it widely available by late Q2 or early Q3.

Using a mixture of panel data, set-top and online information, Nielsen’s TAM product is expected to become a widely accepted extension of its TV ratings, the de facto currency of the TV industry. The new product will offer additional insight into what has been an increasingly fragmented TV audience, tracking viewership across devices and platforms and providing advertisers, media buyers and networks with comparable data on digital, traditional TV and time-shifted TV, as well as the ability to measure ads separately from content.

ComScore, which completed its merger with set-top-box data pioneer Rentrak in January, is expected to launch its total audience product — the Total Home Panel — by the third quarter. Total Home Panel will measure the full range of connected devices: TVs, smartphones, tablets, game consoles and OTT devices, the company said.

The Total Home Panel already is in the testing phase and measuring 4,000 active devices, with 60,000 expected by summer and 300,000 by the end of the year. ComScore, a much-smaller rival to Nielsen, began sending the first batch of its cross-platform ratings data — about 15 months’ worth of information — to clients last week.

Nielsen president of global products Megan Clarken has said her company’s total audience product is a “framework,” adding the data could lead to a rethinking of the way ads are bought or sold.

One possible change Total Audience could bring, she said at the Multichannel News/B&C Advanced Advertising and Audience Measurement Summit earlier this month, could be expanding the time frame over which ads are measured from seven days to several weeks.

“Once they see that data, that on the sixth week of a dramatic series my audience has grown 38% outside that seven-day window … we’ll be able to have a different set of conversations.”

But as technology continues to move forward, accommodating for time-shifted viewing on a DVR is just the tip of the iceberg. Viewers aren’t just watching at different times, they’re watching different content on multiple devices, sometimes simultaneously. With all of those added distractions, finding a way to keep a viewer’s attention, or diverting it from something else, has become increasingly important.

While simultaneous viewing sessions can be short, they can also present opportunities to drive viewers to other sites or programs, provide information, promote brand awareness or just offer a quick commercial burst. And as the number of devices proliferate, finding out how to draw and sometimes divert a viewer’s attention become increasingly important.

COMPILING CONNECTIONS

“If you check on your router at home to check on the number of devices that are connected, it’s crazy,” comScore CEO Serge Matta said. “You don’t realize how quickly those things add up: your smart TVs, Xbox game consoles, Apple TV, smartphones, PCs, tablets, Nests, smart locks. But there is also a lot of noise.

“It’s not simply putting in the hardware, getting the data and you’re good to go,” he added. “There is a lot of edit rules, a lot of cleanup and QA [quality assurance] you have to do.”

ComScore compiles that device data on a panel basis. Participants, who are incented by com- Score, opt in to be measured.

With the Total Home Panel, comScore can gather information on up to 20 devices off a single home router, Matta said. While it is fairly easy to determine which household members are using specific devices, the “noise” enters the data set when a neighbor comes over and accesses the home WiFi for a few hours during a visit.

“The fact that we know who’s in the household and what devices they are watching, we have the ability to see the complete viewing picture of everyone at scale,” Matta said. “This concurrent viewing aspect is really important, and it only becomes more of an issue [as] more devices and … more platforms [are used] over time. That number is only going one way — it’s going up.”

Once simultaneous usage is determined, attentiveness can be measured in terms of time spent with the content or ads on each device, Nielsen senior vice president product leadership Kelly Abcarian said. “[That is] a critical metric that we’ve standardized through the delivery of our Total Audience systems,” she added. “It’s important that a media owner or advertiser know how many people were engaged with the deeper content, but also how much engagement they have and for how long.”

That attentiveness data probably will be more of a customized product, Matta said, but it will be a critical tool for some clients to have in their arsenal.

“It’s a derived methodology, but it’s extremely important for advertisers,” he said. “Are they watching an ad on TV, or are they watching on their tablet? The fact that we know it’s the same person within the same household, who is in the household, and what devices they are watching, we have the ability see the complete picture of everyone at scale.”

With Total Audience not quite out of the blocks yet, adjustments and fi ne-tuning are sure to come. “The problem is, we need to get better data to drive these strategies,” ESPN senior vice president of global research and analytics Artie Bulgrin said. “We know how many people are on our digital platform at any given time, and the same for TV. The problem is we don’t know where they are.”

SEEKING BETTER DATA

ESPN is working with comScore and Nielsen on cross-platform data, Bulgrin said. “The data are getting better, but it’s hardly enough to make a big strategic decision. However, at ESPN, we’re assuming that wherever that person is, there is an opportunity to navigate them.

“Our multiplatform approach has been a big reason why we have been able to maintain audiences where audiences across most of multichannel are declining at a faster rate,” Bulgrin added.

ESPN has been at the forefront of driving the second screen, with continuous crawls during linear programs that tell viewers where they can get more information on stats and sports news and through apps like WatchESPN, and news alerts on social media and via email that drive viewers to the linear channel.

“All of that makes the overall TV experience stickier,” Bulgrin said.

The Council for Research Excellence, an independent, Nielsen-funded group of senior-level industry researchers representing cable and broadcast networks, advertisers and others, hopes to have even more detailed data from an upcoming biometric study that will be headed by Turner Broadcasting System chief research officer Howard Shimmel and Beth Rockwood, in conjunction with Nielsen.

That study will examine whether the proliferation of multiplatform devices could affect the future definition of viewing beyond the current “watching” and “listening.” It will also seek to identify how an expanded understanding of multiplatform device use in a household may increase opportunities for capturing exposure to content.

Multiscreen viewing has helped some traditional programmers because of the nature of devices other than the TV set, Telsey Advisory Group media analyst Tom Eagan said.

“The young people — millennials and younger — they don’t fast-forward [past commercials] because they’re on another device,” Eagan said. “So, the programmer doesn’t have to worry as much. From a programming perspective, they might prefer being on the second device, because at least they are looking up once in a while.”

Looking up from the second or third device is a critical piece of the puzzle and one that programmers and advertisers are struggling with as viewership continues to fragment.

Janet Gallent, senior vice president of NBC Consumer Insights and Innovation Research, oversaw a research project on second-screen engagement as part of her role within CRE’s Media Consumption & Engagement Committee. The CRE research found that audio cues and bright colors appear to be tools that can attract a younger viewer’s attention, Gallent said, something she called the “cocktail room effect.”

In general, even when a person is engaged in a deep conversation, they can have their attention diverted by something as simple as hearing their name mentioned across a crowded room, she explained.

“We’re constantly scanning for what is relevant to us,” Gallent said. “There are certain cues that people attend to. If you’re [watching] the TV screen and [you’re] on your smartphone checking your messages, the audio has the potential to get you back. It can signal to you, ‘This is something I should be paying attention to.’ ”

ESPN has been toying with the idea of creating what it calls a “cognitive bridge” in its own labs, Bulgrin said. “In other words, are there ways to navigate people to that second screen and then back to the first screen at appropriate times. Audio can be one component of that. But it’s very early days. A lot more work needs to be done.”

Part of that additional work will come from the upcoming CRE biometric study that will use physiological data from subjects like eye tracking and facial coding to gauge attention.

Bulgrin said biometrics are another key tool for ESPN and other researchers to gather more precise data. “A lot of this can’t be measured by simply asking people,” he said. “You’re relying on recall and rationalized response. A lot of times the body can tell you a lot more than the person can at a conscious level.”

EVOLVING METRICS

In the meantime, Total Audience will continue to evolve as clients use the data and find new uses for it during the trial period before the wider launch in the fall. The potential is to change not only how clients purchase advertising and through which media, but also how they construct ads, Abcarian said.

“The insights are going to help the dynamics of the market to open up,” Abcarian said. “There is tremendous potential there. A major advertiser may choose to deliver a broad branding message across traditional TV, but there would be elements of that message that would be reinforced or reimagined across digital video.

“What Total Audience allows is the ability to understand that unduplicated reach of the audience exposure to that given advertiser’s message, even as it’s recreated or reimagined, which is a really powerful tool,” she said.

After a year dominated by news of a rise in pay TV subscriber losses, the emergence of “skinny bundles,” falling ratings for programmers and the continued consolidation of cable distribution, several top analysts said they believe 2016 will be a year when the media business begins to sort out its top priorities.

Telsey Advisory Group media analyst Tom Eagan believes ratings measurement — especially Nielsen’s release of its Total Audience Measurement product — could be a game-changer by offering accurate viewer data across content platforms. Falling ratings have hammered networks across the board as younger viewers move to mobile devices to watch content. With the ability to track those viewers, Total Audience Measurement could change that.

“Maybe we’ll see ratings be flat to up in 2016,” Eagan said. “We’ll know some of that when they roll this [Total Audience Measurement] out and when we see negotiations start in earnest for the upfronts in April. We may actually see a slowing down of the ratings declines, which have been occurring for the past three or four years.”

Being able to accurately measure viewing across all platforms and devices will be the final nail in the coffin for the old media business model, Eagan added.

“The old media model on the content side, which was roll out as many cable networks as you can because you’re going to get affiliate fees, is no longer the model,” he said. “You don’t want to have any weak links in your media stable.”

THE DISTRIBUTION DEALS

Pivotal Research Group CEO and senior media & communications analyst Jeff Wlodarczak said obtaining regulatory approval for the biggest merger deals of the year — Charter- Time Warner Cable and Altice’s purchases of Cablevision Systems and Suddenlink Communications — will be the top stories of 2016, but for a different reason than most suspect.

Wlodarczak said the industry will watch the Altice deals closely on the cost synergy fronts. Altice has said it believes it can squeeze $900 million in costs from Cablevision and another $215 million from Suddenlink, figures some analysts have said are too high. (The Federal Communications Commission gave the nod to Altice’s Suddenlink acquisition on Dec. 18.)

“If they do have the magic cost-cutting bullet, then others in the industry can implement the same strategies to boost EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] margins,” Wlodarczak said.

As far as Charter, Wlodarczak said cable operators will be watching closely to see if bringing CEO Tom Rutledge’s business strategies to the combined entity will eventually drive low double-digit cash flow growth in 2017 and beyond.

The emergence of skinny bundles — smaller programming packages for cheaper prices — also made a big splash this year, with Verizon Communications’s FiOS TV Custom TV package, and are expected to continue to be news in 2016. FiOS Custom TV includes 45 channels — minus ESPN — for $54.95 per month initially, stepping up to $84.95 per month after a year. Subscribers also can choose from other programming packages, grouped by genres like Lifestyle, Entertainment, News & Info, Pop Culture, Kids and Sports, for an additional $10 per month.

Skinny bundles caused a bit of a stir at first — ESPN sued Verizon over dropping it from the Custom TV lineup — but haven’t really taken hold yet, mainly because existing programming contracts make it hard for distributors to break up the existing “fat” bundle. And several cable CEOs have said customers may come in inquiring about skinny packages, but the vast majority end up taking the full product suite.

Still, some over-the-top services like Dish Network’s Sling TV, which offers about 23 networks (including ESPN) for $20 per month in a single stream, have claimed success. Others, like Verizon’s go90 mobile-only service and Sony’s PlayStation Vue, are still searching for a market.

Eagan said skinny bundles could end up diluting demand for OTT.

CORD-CUTTING, SHAVING

Subscribing to skinny bundles “is the same as cord-shaving, but it’s voluntary cord-shaving,” Eagan said. “I think it will help offset the popularity of some of the OTT bundles.”

The emergence of more OTT players coincided with an acceleration in cord-cutting in Q2 and Q3, but cable operators were largely spared, due mainly to cable’s dominance in the broadband arena.

The rollout of DOCSIS 3.1, expected in the second half of the year and offering cable customers 1 Gigabit-per-second to 10-Gbps speeds, should help solidify that dominance, Wlodarczak added.

With cord-cutting not as big a concern for cable operators, MoffettNathanson principal and senior media analyst Craig Moffett said he believes the biggest overhang on the stocks will be the fear that Comcast or other operators will participate in the upcoming federal spectrum auctions as buyers.

“In the past, dalliances with wireless have been a significant negative for the stock, and we suspect some of the recent weakness in the shares owes to fears of reckless spending on either spectrum itself or on a network thereafter,” Moffett wrote, adding that it “is honestly not something we worry too much about.”

The television industry’s quest for a true multi-platform measurement metric continued  to move forward Wednesday, with broadcaster CBS announcing that its digital subscription service CBS All Access will become the first app and online offering to be certified for Nielsen’s Digital in TV Ratings measurement.

The new relationship is a component of Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement initiative, which is expected to provide measurement data across all viewing platforms including linear, digital video recorders, online and mobile.

As more and more consumers view content on different devices and through DVRs as well as live TV, content companies have been clamoring for a new currency to measure total viewership, regardless of the device or the time period. ComScore’s $779 million agreement to purchase rival measurement firm Rentrak on Tuesday is another example of how pressing the need for more accurate measurement has become.

With the Nielsen deal, CBS becomes the first network broadcaster to  include digital audience measurement in their television ratings by incorporating Nielsen’s SDK metering technology into CBS All Access within its mobile apps and online video player. With this agreement, CBS will be able to measure viewership of All Access’ live offering of local CBS TV stations (available in about 95 markets), across Android and iOS systems, and desktop and laptop computers. This is in addition to the existing measurement of current season on demand content through other measurement products and Nielsen Television Index’s measurement of Connected TV viewing.

 “CBS’s world-class content is being consumed across multiple platforms and devices,” said CBS Digital Media EVP and GM Marc DeBevoise in a statement. “From day one, we made it a priority for CBS All Access to provide the most sophisticated measurement capabilities and have been working closely with Nielsen to implement Digital in TV Ratings. We look forward to working closely with Nielsen to further expand measurement across even more platforms in the near future.”

Nielsen’s Total Audience enables content providers to monetize digital audiences through both linear and dynamic ad models, leveraging its Nielsen TV panel with census-based measurement. With Digital in TV Ratings, Nielsen will report audiences for ratings-qualified content consumed across both computer and mobile devices and add this viewing into the current existing C3/C7/Average Quarter Hour TV Ratings services.

“Nielsen’s mobile and computer ratings reinforce our commitment to provide comprehensive Total Audience measurement, measuring audiences anywhere and on any platform they are using to watch content,” said Nielsen Managing Director National Client Service Peter Bradbury in a statement. “We are very excited about the advancements we’ve made in TV audience ratings by including digital in order to understand viewing beyond traditional television, and we will continue to work very closely with CBS as they expand their digital measurement strategy.”