Isba’s Phil Smith: Advertisers should take a bigger stake in Origin
The Future of TV Advertising Global
What could the future of Origin’s governance look like?
For one, outgoing Isba director-general Phil Smith has called on advertisers to take a larger financial stake in the cross-media measurement initiative.
“If advertisers want to have the change they seek, they are going to have to lean in to this and take an active financial stake and leadership within this as well,” he told a crowd at The Future of TV Advertising Global last month. “More so than they might have done in the past.”
That could mean a future in which advertisers account for 40% of Origin’s funding, Smith suggested.
Currently, Origin is backed by roughly 50 stakeholders across the UK media industry, including ad buyers and sellers as well as agency groups.
The project, which is currently led by Isba, raised £52m in 2024. Isba plans to transfer operations of Origin to a separate legal entity, Origin Media Measurement Limited, which would have led to a “significant reduction” in its income.
But how Origin will precisely be governed given its various stakeholders, some of whom have competing interests, is an open question for the future.
“Origin may not be the end state,” Smith conceded. “But we conceived Origin as a joint industry body, based on joint industry currency principles, but not intending to supplant any of the joint industry currencies.”
He added that the idea of Origin being led by a “super JIC” — a collaboration of joint industry currencies — “may be a model that emerges”.
“We think Origin is an elegant solution for now, but it does require a degree of trust and collaboration across the industry, which has not always been evident in the last five years, as we all know,” Smith joked.
He added that Origin is currently working with long-term supporters TikTok and Amazon, which will be integrated into the platform “shortly”, as the initiative looks to graduate from beta trials later this year.
Have we ever done TV measurement right?
Smith was speaking on a panel alongside Jeff Eales, director of systems and development at Sky Media, and Lisa Walker, head of media and sponsorship at Vodafone.
Eales argued that the biggest challenge Origin faces is in how it defines a single view, especially as he believes the initiative will be used as a currency.
“When you’re first building something that is absolutely going to be used as a currency or, dare I say, to be used within any measurement environment,” he said. “You need to know it’s vigorous.”
Origin’s leadership, as well as brands backing the project, have repeatedly stated that Origin should not and will not be used as a currency.
Nevertheless, Smith said Origin is “very much committed to those principles of accountability”, but acknowledged that there are likely to be “heterogeneity issues because not all media is served up in the same way”.
When asked whether she attributes much value to a two-second video exposure, Walker replied: “You have to live in the reality of what consumers are doing.”
“It’s no use saying I wish they looked at my Instagram ad for a little bit longer, because that’s not the reality,” she continued. “Certainly within our media plan, there’s long form, there’s short form, and the campaign works because it all works together.”
Walker added that Vodafone has become “versed in optimising ultra-short-form formats”, concluding: “It’s no use pretending that people are being attentive and watch our ads from beginning to end when they don’t.”
Plan tabled for Barb to join Origin in hybrid reporting model
Smith seized on her comments, suggesting that “we shouldn’t make assumptions about where we are today” because “we’re not actually measuring completed views with our core reporting system today”. He argued that Barb’s existing measurement, which is on a minute-by-minute basis, is less useful than second-by-second measurement.
Barb is currently in the midst of moving towards second-by-second audience measurement.
More broadly, given the differences in how the industry currently measures all sorts of different media, is it even possible to come up with a consistent way to measure everything?
Smith said: “Honest answer is: I doubt it will ever be perfect, but there will be conventions that we will have to agree.”
The panel was chaired by Jon Watts, managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement.