Origin: Bring on the evidence, but let’s agree on what counts
Follow The Money – with Ian Whittaker
Analyst Ian Whittaker continues the Origin debate and explains five questions which could determine its future.
Jon Watts is right on one point in his recent article, so let me start there.
Assertion is not evidence. His response to Justin Lebbon, and his challenge to me on LinkedIn, was fair: if you make claims about how advertisers view Origin, you should be able to back them. That is more than reasonable; I spent two decades as a City analyst holding management teams to that standard.
So let me be precise about my claim, and then propose how we settle the wider question.
First, the claim. My argument was never about what advertisers say, nor the effort they have put into Origin. Nobody disputes the effort: Origin counts almost 70 supporting organisations, and senior marketers have given it serious time. Watts is right, and their efforts make that clear.
My argument is about incentives. Advertisers benefit from cross-media transparency in aggregate; individual marketing teams face little career risk from the status quo but do face meaningful disruption from adopting a new currency.
The major platforms have no commercial reason to be measured on common terms: their participation has always been conditional, and they make the boundaries clear as to their own disclosure. Agencies sit in the middle with conflicts of their own. This is not mind-reading; it is the incentives analysis that any investor would run before believing a growth story.
If Watts thinks I am wrong on the incentives, that is a debate worth having. It is, however, a different debate from “advertisers worked hard on Origin”. Both can be true: real effort but also an incentive structure working against adoption.
One further observation, aimed at nobody in particular. The Origin debate has been conducted almost entirely in measurement terms: methodology, governance, participation. What is missing is the commercial lens: how businesses will use the output, who will control it, and how boards and CFOs will frame what it tells them. Apply that lens and the picture changes.
What counts as evidence
Equity research rests on a distinction that decides most arguments: stated preference versus revealed preference. What people say they value versus what they pay for, in its essence.
Items such as committee participation, stakeholder counts, and hours invested are stated preference. In investment terms, they are sunk costs. No analyst accepts them as evidence of commercial demand, for the same reason no analyst accepts letters of intent as revenue. The evidence that matters is what the money does.
The market test for Origin comes down to five questions:
1. Adoption: how many advertisers pay for Origin, at what level, and what share of UK ad spend do they represent?
2. Usage: are planning and trading decisions changing on Origin data? Can anyone point to budgets that moved because of an Origin report?
3. Renewal: of the early subscribers, how many renew, and at what price?
4. Unit economics: what does Origin cost to run, and what is the credible path to covering that from subscription revenue rather than goodwill?
5. Incentive alignment: which stakeholders lose if Origin succeeds, and how much control do they hold over its inputs?
On urgency, one piece of negative evidence is worth weighing: the dog that has not barked.
We know what advertiser urgency looks like when it is real. In 2017, brand safety concerns saw major advertisers pull spend from YouTube within days; platform behaviour changed within weeks. Most of those advertisers later returned, but the point is how quickly money moved when the issue mattered.
If a single cross-media currency were a commercial priority of that order, advertisers would make participation a condition of trading and tie spend to it. Nothing of that scale has happened with Origin.
The absence of pressure is not proof, and pressure may be applied privately and through trade bodies; but any analyst would treat the silence as a data point and want it explained.
These questions are no longer hypothetical
ISBA is in exclusive talks with Fifty5Blue, formerly Kantar Media, over a minority investment in Origin as it becomes a standalone company; an agreement is expected as soon as September.
Fifty5Blue already runs Origin’s panel collection. Any investor writing that cheque will run precisely the diligence set out above: adoption, usage, renewal, economics.
The structure also sharpens question five: a supplier taking an equity stake in the currency it collects the data for deserves scrutiny, whatever the deal’s merits. External capital is a signal, but it is not the same signal as customer demand.
These questions are answerable, and the answers can go both ways. If Origin’s numbers are strong, its supporters should welcome the scrutiny: strong numbers end this debate quickly. If they are weak, no volume of goodwill will save it. Measurement currencies live or die on commercial adoption, not sentiment, and the same is true here.
The deeper risk
On to the commercial lens, and a structural point that should concern Origin’s supporters more than its critics. Common currencies trade on the lowest common denominator. The only metric that can be made comparable across television, video, display and social is exposure: reach, frequency, cost per unit. What differentiates media does not survive the translation: attention, context, creative effect, brand outcomes.
And what gets measured in common terms gets bought on price. That is what happened with programmatic, which gave everyone a common unit and traded relentlessly toward its cheapest version.
A single cross-media standard risks repeating that logic at scale. It positions advertising as a cost to be minimised per unit rather than an investment that compounds. Once that framing reaches the CFO’s office, it is very hard to reverse. It also runs directly against the industry’s parallel effort, which I strongly support, to prove advertising’s role in driving enterprise value.
None of this is anyone’s intent. It is an unintended structural consequence, and like everything else here it is testable: watch whether cross-media trading conversations centre on incremental value, or on cost per point.
The offer
Watts’ CIMM and WFA study on cross-media measurement is well timed. On the substance, we may agree more than this exchange suggests: launching the study, Watts himself observed that the commercial sustainability of different solutions remains unclear, and CIMM’s own work estimates an entry-level national TV currency needs roughly $135m in annual revenues to be sustainable.
That clarity would be what I support. So one request: publish the commercial metrics alongside the methodology and the progress narrative. Adoption, usage, renewal, economics. That evidence settles this.
One point for transparency: I am a member of the PXI Institute, which Watts runs. Readers can weigh this exchange with that in view. And, for my part, it has been exactly what he called for. Rigorous and constructive.
Finally, an offer. Let’s do this properly, in public, with data on the table: a structured debate on the commercial future of cross-media measurement.
Watts can bring the measurement case; I will bring the capital markets case. The industry would learn more from an hour of that than from a dozen comment threads.
Evidence, not assertion, is the key. Now let’s agree on what evidence means.
Ian Whittaker is a media analyst and the founder and managing partner of advisory firm Liberty Sky Advisors.