Connected TV Experience: Alps laments Google’s “mis-placed energy”
Google’s new broadband homes research initiative came under the microscope during the final session of the day – Metrics – at MediaTel Group’s The Connected TV Experience conference. Tess Alps, chief executive of Thinkbox, questioned why Google should be proceeding with this outside the industry – “It seems like mis-placed energy. Why don’t you bring your money and energy to BARB…it’s a bit slower, but would get to a better place?”
Alps’ comment came just a week after BARB announced its own plans for solving the missing broadcast viewers conundrum.
Jonny Protheroe, research manager at Google put forward a calm response to a series of points around trust, technical ability and motivation. He said that speed was of the essence, but “Google will look to share or partner in the future”.
Protheroe said that Google’s cross-media panel (built by Kantar) would aim to “answer questions we get all the time from agencies, such as incremental reach, simultaneous device usage and how TV drives online pages like search”.
The survey was still in its early stages, but would launch early next year, he said. “There is no decision on whether it will be free yet, but nobody will be prevented from having acess to data.” He expected to bring industry partners on board to steer it and fund it in time. “It doesn’t make sense for a media owner to be the only one behind it, but we’ll put it out there first and if people use it and there is value in it, people will support it.”
From the floor, UKOM’s general manager, James Smythe spoke of the “philanthropic Google”, but admitted UKOM just did not have the funding to explore further into these areas. Its concentration was still on reporting video fully – planned for release in the New Year. Both Smythe and BARB’s CEO Bjarne Thelin were clear that Google had many hurdles to overcome to deliver its aim, but Thelin accepted “we need to stop relying on one supplier…we may benefit at the end of the day.”
Earlier Thelin was told by Rhys McLachlan, Mediacom’s head of futures, that the time for discussion was well past. “The VOD market will be worth £25m-£30m next year – it’s too late for dialogue.” McLachlan was referring to BARB’s Measurement Sciences Forum, announced last week to agree industry standards and how data from the new web TV meter with Kantar should be reported – “people are still comparing apples and pears,” said Thelin. The survey will see 11,000 homes in a year reporting web TV as well as linear TV…it’s not about the start of something, it’s about pulling the industry together. We are within touching distance now…. we need a joined-up approach, rather than seeing things fragment.”
“We would love to move at a faster pace, but we have to be careful with the BARB panel.”
David Fletcher, head of analytics & insight at MEC, was supportive. “Everyone wants it to move faster, but people hold it back and there are lots of technical challenges. They have to go at the pace they go.”