CFlight won’t be enough to solve TV’s accountability problem
Marketers must be given the independent hands-on-keyboards visibility and control they need, writes the CEO of TV data specialist Adgile and former global head of media at Vodafone
Good data and measurement drives accountability, and accountability is one of the core issues that modern marketers face.
As a former advertiser-side marketer and media lead (Vodafone, Xbox, Kimberly-Clark), I’m perhaps better placed than others to comment on this from the position I now hold as the CEO of Adgile, a technology business that delivers performance management platform capabilities for TV advertising.
The recent deployment of CFlight is a welcome and necessary step forwards for the UK TV industry in addressing the data and measurement problems that exist with television. CFlight was developed by Sky owner NBCUniversal as a means of measuring total reach and frequency across their linear and video-on-demand (VOD) offerings, with ITV and Channel 4 adopting the technology later this year.
Adgile are supporters of this and other initiatives to address this measurement territory. TV has long been evidenced through rigorous studies as the most effective media channel for advertising and business outcomes – bar none.
A missed opportunity
However, the imperative for TV to become more accountable across different forms of content distribution, and within more immediate campaign timeframes, has remained a point of missed opportunity for the industry.
The underlying issues preventing unified, real time measurement, are the same for almost all markets – in that there is an accelerating fragmentation and incompatibility of data sets across all forms of television, whether linear or on demand.
The incompatibility here exists at a fundamental level, where there typically is no standard and common identifier across TV advertising.
We have seen the industry seek to address this data creation and matching problem in different ways, from the demand-side (with advertisers empowering industry bodies, such as WFA, ISBA in the UK or the ANA in US), broadcaster-funded JICs (such as OZTAM / VOZ in Australia) or broadcasters directly themselves (such as CFlight in the US and UK).
Each has their own pros and cons, are on their own pace of journey, and each has had varying degrees of success so far.
Transformation of systems is hard. Navigating boundaries – whether technological, commercial or political – is harder still.
Marketers still see TV as a “black box”
CFlight is interesting because it appears to create an essential data layer – through harnessing a number of different technologies and governance principles – to enable unified audience measurement (allowing of course for the dependencies of broad supply-side market adoption).
But, although positive, CFlight is not the answer in and of itself to the accountability problem that marketers face.
At the Future TV Advertising Forum, Carsten Knoch presented the findings of a study he undertook for ThinkTV Canada, that showed marketers feel uninvolved with their TV campaigns,
Knoch explained that TV is considered “low touch” and a “black box” to brands, and that – when expressed as a product or transaction – the user experience for marketers is virtually non-existent.
These are important insights because the accountability problem is defined by whether marketers can take necessary action on their terms – enabling the real time and frictionless means to understand, optimise and activate their TV advertising planning and buying.
Performance management is the real opportunity
For a digital, platform-based era, solving the data and measurement problem alone is not enough.
The industry must now address the accepted and expected real-time performance management requirements that brands and agencies have been demanding.
Marketers must be given the independent hands-on-keyboards visibility and control they need – critically across both linear and on demand TV in combination – and for all forms of TV advertising (spot, sponsorship or in-programme integrations).
We already have the greatest asset we could wish for – screens and content that demand attention, and therefore give highly effective advertising outcomes.
The harmonisation of TV data is a big step forward, and definitively the right one. But performance management for TV advertising is the real opportunity for the industry to solve and champion, and the time is now to realise this.