What role can audience data play in addressing this potential crisis of reach?
Essential to measuring reach is the scope of the measurement itself. This raises some ‘existential’ questions about the degree to which traditional ‘TV’ currencies should be ‘Video’ currencies and their capability - and willingness - to encompass all forms of video to enable the widest reach to be measured.
However, there would appear to be less defensiveness from broadcasters around traditional definitions of television, and it was stated that perhaps it is actually some media agencies that still have a silo mentality when it comes to defining and comparing across media. Amongst our group though, there was consensus that TV JICs and currencies should now be ‘Video JICs’. This is increasingly important as achieving reach becomes more and more complex. However, there is still a noticeable variation in the willingness of TV currencies to actively engage with, for example, Google and other online companies.
Our experts highlighted the key role that research panels can play in providing context for first-party data sets, in tying them together and particularly as a source of demographics to track reach across platforms. With that, there is also a shared understanding that panels alone cannot cope. There is the issue of fragmentation, tracking video placed on tens of thousands of websites is an impossible challenge for a panel. In this regard, panels can play a key role in linking different data sets to harness their combined power.
If we can agree on the scope of video measurement and the need for a widening of appropriate data sources to augment panels, what are the implications for governance? Crucially, who pays to measure reach across this complex ecosystem of services, platforms, and devices? What is clear is that the crisis in measuring reach across platforms has led to a more proactive involvement from the advertisers themselves.