Digital measurement getting easier
A proliferation in the ways shoppers engage with retailers and consume content across platforms has transformed traditional marketing and spawned new approaches to measuring advertising effectiveness.
This week digital measurement leader comScore said it had joined with the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) to expand a cross-platform measurement service that provides a continuous view and measurement of media suage across TV, radio, desktop, smartphone and mobile.
The initiative will allow media companies, marketers and advertising agencies the opportunity to measure things such as multi-platform advertising, mobile video, time-shifted viewing such as DVR playback and children’s viewing.
According to comScore, the innovations build upon the firm’s methods of addressing the cross-platform measurement challenge during its initial phase, known as Project Blueprint. The initial proof of concept, done in collaboration with Arbitron and ESPN, expanded comScore’s existing multi-platform audience de-duplication methodology for desktop, smartphone and tablet internet usage to TV and radio in order to deliver the industry’s first unified view of these five major media platforms.
“In teaming with CIMM and our other collaborators, we look forward to expanding our cross-platform measurement service to help solve the media industry’s foremost challenge of measuring audiences for content and advertising in today’s multi-platform world,” said comScore president Serge Matta. “The expansion of this service seeks to address some of the more important challenges, such as multi-platform ad exposure and measurement of mobile video and time-shifted video. With accurate accounting of media consumption at a granular level across all the major media platforms, brands will now have the opportunity to understand their audiences in a more holistic fashion.”
The firm contends the expanded cross-platform measurement service will be the only one of its kind to leverage both person-level TV viewing data (obtained via the Portable People Meter technology licensed from Nielsen Audio and Set-Top Box viewing data, which includes viewing behavior from more than five million households. The service also leverages a state-of-the-art technology using both panel and census-based methods to accurately measure online and mobile video viewing, addressing increasingly important components of the TV/video landscape. Reporting will deliver granular metrics at the network, show and telecast level that accounts for long tail viewing, thereby providing the scale required by media companies and advertisers. Comparable cross-media metrics, such as duplicated and unduplicated audience size and composition, duration, reach/frequency, and GRPs/TRPs, will also be featured in the reporting provided to clients.
“As an industry alliance, CIMM is focused on identifying and fostering new methodologies and approaches that can help improve cross-platform audience media measurement for the entire media ecosystem,” said the organization’s managing director Jane Clarke. “CIMM played an early role in funding and conducting cross-platform research, which ultimately brought comScore, Arbitron and ESPN together to collaborate on a successful five-platform measurement service, Blueprint. Now, CIMM is eager to bring other CIMM member companies together to work with comScore to determine the feasibility of syndicating the service industry-wide.”
CIMM was founded in 2009 by leading television content providers, media agencies and advertisers to promote innovation in audience measurement for television and cross-platform media. Since then the organization has explored and identified new methodologies and approaches to audience measurement through proof-of-concept pilot studies with independent measurement companies, initially focusing on two key areas: What are the opportunities and challenges of using return path data from set-top boxes and smart TV’s to measure viewing of television and what solutions can be developed to measure use of media across platforms?