Big Data: From crude oil to refined insights

Richard Marks, chief executive of Kantar Media Audiences, looks at the increasing importance of TV data and how it is becoming the “new oil” for the industry.

At MediaTel’s recent “Connected TV Experience” event, a panel of industry experts debated where TV measurement was headed in a connected digital world. Meanwhile, three preceding recent events had underlined that data and its role in the UK media scene is very much at front stage at the moment.

• At BARB’s “The Bigger Picture” event, Bjarne Thelin, its Chief Executive, called on the industry to use BARB as a fulcrum to allow the numerous television-related data sets available – server data, customer data, Set Top Box and VOD – to be calibrated and understood in the context of the wider TV universe. To progress this he announced the formation of a ‘Measurement Sciences Forum’.
• Earlier in the summer Google announced its intention to build a UK three screen electronic panel encompassing TV, online and mobile and has entered into a series of meetings around the industry aimed at engaging with UK broadcasters, advertisers and platforms.
• Meanwhile at the Royal Television Society in Cambridge last month, I introduced a session entitled ‘Data Data Everywhere, but not much time to think’ during which Dawn Airey, David Abrahams of Channel 4 and Matt Brittin of Google debated the role of data in television going forward: is access to viewer data a common asset from which all benefit (the prevailing BARB model) or a secret weapon, to be jealously guarded to give competitive advantage?

So what can we conclude from this recent maelstrom of activity around audience data?

Well data is the ‘new oil’, the ‘new black’, even the new ‘rock ‘n roll’ if the current media obsession with Data Visualisation (or ‘Data Viz’) is anything to go by, and recently my own company, Kantar partnered with David McCandless to create the ‘Data Visualisation Awards’ – www.informationisbeautifulawards.com.

What we do know is that – as a result of TV’s digital liberation from linear broadcasting and the TV screen – many measurement telescopes are now trained on the TV sky at night. Meanwhile, advertisers and platforms are cultivating their own data streams and building direct digital relationships with audiences and customers.

Certainly data that gives genuine new insights about a TV campaign (or indeed a cross-media campaign) is an asset, but reports from multiple data sets that offer conflicting views of success or failure can be actively dangerous and worse than no data at all.

Clearly the existing currency has a key role to play here and as their recent event and announcement shows, BARB is wise to this. In terms of the TV ‘bigger picture’, BARB has the potential to give the context for better understanding of these newer data sets, sources that can give us the additional granularity of measurement of specific parts of the TV universe.

TV as an industry has a unique advantage in the transparency of its measurement and is well placed to build on the opportunities that new data sets and the Google initiative offer. That transparency has always been its strength compared to, say, Internet data.

However, in using and incorporating these data sets, quality has to remain paramount. Kantar Media was the first agency to enter into the field of Set Top Box data processing and we know from hard experience around the world that a lot of work is needed to turn raw ‘server’ data into representative viewing data.

Simply analysing raw drawn directly from digital sources without examining the balance of the data – what it represents and how it is gathered – would be as naïve as expecting to attach a pipe to an oil rig and pump the crude oil straight into your car. So in that respect perhaps the future of the research agencies in a fully digital world will be more equivalent to that of oil refineries – taking crude digital data and refining it into reliable and actionable insights.

Perhaps the best analogy was drawn recently by my colleague Nick Nyhan, Kantar’s Chief Digital Officer, who feels that media researchers are transitioning from being farmers – lovingly tending the crops of their industry surveys, towards being chefs – gathering the very best research ingredients to create a nourishing meal.