Barb and Isba must find consensus
Opinion
Isba has beta-launched Origin without Barb data and is delivering data that doesn’t meet MRC standard. Why is the industry risking more friction and higher costs?
Anyone who has spent time working at a trade association, trade marketing body or joint industry measurement organisation will have stories about the challenges of finding common ground among stakeholders.
With two of these types of organisation on my CV, I’ve picked up a few scars on the way to delivering successful outcomes.
Recent coverage about whether Barb and Isba can work together on cross-media audience measurement is an instance of two such organisations looking for common ground with each other.
Finding common ground
This shouldn’t be difficult when you look at the principles for cross-media measurement set out by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).
These are closely aligned to Barb’s operating principles — notably the need for consistent audience building blocks that adhere to industry-agreed standards.
Shortly before the WFA published its principles, Marc Pritchard, global chief marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, called for a level playing field in measurement standards. He likened the situation to each American football team having a different rule for how many yards had to be gained to achieve a first down.
And Keith Weed, then of Unilever, pointed to the likely reaction of a consumer who bought a tub of Ben & Jerry’s only to discover it was half-full. He called for audience measurement that supports the three Vs of viewability, verification and value.
Consistent audience building blocks provide a bedrock of comparability. Without comparability, you can’t truly understand the incremental contribution of different media services and platforms to campaign objectives.
To this end, there are two questions to align on.
How do we report exposure levels that inform effective outcomes? And how do we enable open and fair assessment of all media investment options in the AV space?
Joint industry credentials
On Monday night, our industry came together to celebrate the latest winners of the IPA Effectiveness Awards. The importance of these awards — which support our industry’s shared language on how advertising works — grows as the task of proving outcomes gets trickier.
How do we understand brand effects alongside performance objectives? How do we understand short- and long-term effects? And how do we understand which media is most effective at helping brand owners find new customers?
There are excellent practitioners who help brand owners answer these questions; most of these experts support the need for consistent audience building blocks. Based on past experience and the richness of Barb insight, I expect our viewing data is baked into many of the IPA’s winning submissions.
Importantly, the IPA is a very influential voice at the Barb board table. On behalf of media agencies, it is responsible for over one-sixth of Barb’s funding and has corresponding voting rights.
Alongside the IPA’s commitment to effectiveness, commercial broadcasters want to demonstrate how advertising on their services contributes to business outcomes. This aligns with media owners and platforms in other sectors.
And we value the long-term support of the advertiser community. While Isba’s long-standing role on our board is in a non-voting capacity, we are transparent on everything from strategic priorities to the annual operating budget.
With the backing of this joint industry set of stakeholders, Barb has well-established credentials for providing audience data that’s needed to account for investment in media advertising.
We have always taken responsibility for providing campaign-exposure data that can be integrated with other data sources to demonstrate how advertising is delivering business growth. This is some responsibility when you consider AV media are widely regarded as the most effective form of advertising.
And we have responsibilities to the programme community and industry regulators. But let’s park these for the moment.
Changing data requirement
Innovation and evolution have been constants as Barb fulfils our responsibilities to brand owners and their media agencies.
Over the years, we’ve adapted to new ad formats. We started reporting dynamically inserted ads when Sky launched AdSmart over 12 years ago and have recently extended our campaign reporting to include VOD services. We support a virtuous cycle of campaign optimisation by reporting linear/VOD campaign exposure through a combination of CFlight and Advanced Campaign Hub.
And we’ve embraced new entrants. Nowhere else in the world are pure-play streamers such as Amazon, Disney and Netflix getting on board with joint industry campaign-reporting systems.
Internationally agreed standard
We can’t escape the international backdrop to the question of how brand owners — many of which are global businesses — get the cross-media measurement they’re seeking.
The leading US online platforms have a significant role in how solutions are being designed, developed and funded. And the foundation stone of the modern definition of audiences for the purposes of cross-media analysis was developed in the US by the Media Rating Council (MRC).
Over the second half of the last decade, the MRC brought all sides of the industry together to agree the cross-media standard for video audience measurement. Advertisers were in the room, as well as media agencies, broadcast networks and online platforms.
The process was informed by an extensive programme of research and analysis led by the MRC and reached consensus on metrics that answer two questions. Did people have an opportunity to watch an ad? And how long did the opportunity last for?
From this — and for the purpose of cross-media measurement — the MRC established a minimum level of exposure that’s regarded as an opportunity to see a video ad. This is defined as 100% of pixels on screen for at least two seconds — a person has to be in front of the screen and, where measurable, audio needs to be on. And non-human traffic needs to be filtered out.
Building on this minimum, the MRC standard stipulates duration weighting. This has the advantage of normalising exposure across platforms and media, while also accounting for different ad lengths.
The question of effectiveness wasn’t far from the MRC-led conversation, although consensus on an effective level of exposure wasn’t the target. The recommendation is that duration-weighted metrics are used in conjunction with ad effectiveness and return on investment metrics to enable comparable evaluation of spend and delivery.
Barb is embracing the MRC cross-media standard as we work towards second-by-second reporting. Given the challenges of boundless configurability, we’re aiming for a finite menu of campaign-exposure metrics that includes both duration weighting and the minimum cross-media viewability standard.
Importing from the US
Last week, I visited the US for a fact-finding trip. Unlike in the UK, there isn’t a history of joint industry commissioning of audience data.
Nielsen has long been a universally accepted source of truth for understanding what people watch, albeit with independent oversight from the MRC on the quality and fairness of its audience ratings. Yet things are changing and in recent years there’s been a significant increase in the number of businesses offering audience-measurement services.
While I was there, news broke that Paramount and Nielsen have reached a contract impasse. At the time of writing, the US industry is holding its breath to see if this is a short-term issue or perhaps the first signs of a major network starting life without relying on Nielsen data.
Whatever the outcome, the increased competition in audience-data suppliers has had three effects: more innovation, higher costs and more doubt about which numbers to work with.
Innovation is clearly to be welcomed, while research and data suppliers will welcome higher spending on solutions. But more doubt about audience numbers increases friction and erodes the benefits that come from a universally accepted source of truth.
Friction between buyers and sellers increases in any marketplace that has reduced transparency and conflicting sources of information. This is why I also frequently heard words like “chaos” and “mess” during my trip.
Universally accepted source of truth?
In the UK, Barb has been the universally accepted source of truth for many years. Recent events have confirmed the financial backers of Origin have sanctioned a solution with alternative viewing figures; these will introduce contradictory data, increase friction and lead to higher research costs across our industry.
Barb has been consistently ready to let our data be used alongside other sources of online video data that adhere to the MRC cross-media standard. While Isba says Origin will report to this standard, it is also including all commercial impressions.
This means cross-media reporting of video impressions that fail to meet the minimum viewability threshold — that’s less than two seconds, less than 100% of pixels on screen and no confirmation of a person in front of the device.
Given Isba is the pioneer for implementing the WFA vision, it’s fair to ask why it’s not following the only internationally agreed standard that normalises exposure across media services and platforms.
Are advertisers happy to blend video impressions that meet the MRC cross-media viewability standard with others that fail to get over the threshold? Or is it because Origin’s funding from one or other online platform is contingent on not having to meet the MRC cross-media video standard? Following the money is often instructive.
Like other joint industry measurement services, Barb has been forged in the fire of consensus-building. Objectivity, transparency and accountability are baked into what we do and how we continue to evolve.
Our operating principles protect against a methodology being developed that is prejudiced for or against any of the media services we report audiences for. And that is yet another principle we share with the WFA.
Justin Sampson is CEO of Barb