Media Playground: TV measurement is not keeping up with technology
Panellists at MediaTel Group’s Media Playground event at RBS were in agreement that there are exciting new opportunities for the TV advertising marketplace but continued concerns over measurement.
Agencies are now putting 5% of TV advertising budgets into VOD, according to James Grant, Country Manager, UK, Vindico. Advertising always follows eyeballs but as an industry we are not moving as fast as eyeballs at the moment, with measurement being a big issue, according to the panel. Grant claimed that BARB is completing its mission statement as TV viewing on the web is not being measured.
Rhys MacLachlan, director of Corporate & Business Development (UK) at Videology, believes that measurement isn’t what is holding the industry back, but the entanglement with legacy broadcast channels. He claims that Videology is putting the right ads in front of the right people and are not held back by clumsy social demographic data.
Jon Hewson, advertising business director EMEA at ROVI Corporation, said that ROVI’s advertising offering has been in the market for a year now and has seen a big shift in that time. It’s no longer just looked at as R&D but now a media buy, with agencies now trying to set up agency deals with the company, according to Hewson.
Likewise Stephen Poole, multi-platform group sales controller at ITV, explained that ITV is selling web-only deals to clients.
Nigel Walley, managing director at Decipher, pointed out that the broadcast TV model is not broken but in rude health, and that VOD is an enhancement to that model.
Walley explained that 99% of VOD at the moment is delivered to solo viewers, so the current internet measurement model works. However as ITV, Channel 4 and others continue putting their VOD offerings direct onto the big screen, this then becomes a shared experience and the BARB premise of “who’s in the room” is vital. Group measurement has always been the internet’s failings.
Bjarne Thelin, chief executive of BARB, explained from the audience the huge development work that is currently going on at BARB to look beyond the TV set and beyond the seven days that is currently measured. He stated that some things may be too difficult to measure but that it is a highly complicated area. He hopes that some data may be available before he steps down as chief executive, but that is more likely to be after.