With the data landscape becoming more gated, what does progress look like?
Opinion
Progress in online audience measurement means putting humans at the heart of media and working through a deep understanding of real people. Not IDs, devices, users or accounts.
Every joint industry measurement body walks two high wires. One between its media, agency and advertiser stakeholders. And one between doing things fast and doing things right.
For UKOM, the industry body for online audience measurement since 2009, both high wires are unusually tricky. Platforms, publishers, advertisers and agencies are all grappling with the challenge of profitably delivering (and measuring) excellence in digital channels. And the need to deliver it now.
A few years ago, UKOM celebrated the delivery of daily topline data and a single-source view of how the UK population lives its life on PC, tablet and smartphone. But we knew that there were gaps that the industry wanted us to fill.
Driving innovation
Recently, with Ipsos, we celebrated having filled some of those gaps.
We called the event Driving Digital Innovation for a reason.
When we appointed Ipsos to deliver Iris, the UK industry standard for online audience measurement, I was told that we could consider the partnership a success only if certain capabilities were delivered.
Iris data should be able to celebrate four critical achievements, each relevant for the industry:
- Activate in the programmatic space
- Integrate into an agency’s proprietary planning system
- “See” inside YouTube
- Expand video measurement beyond YouTube
A ‘game-changer’
And so, on 21 November, we invited speakers from an agency, a premium publisher collective, a premium broadcaster and the UK’s largest video platform to talk about how and why they are using UKOM data.
Matt Townsend and Frances Lazenby from Ozone summed up delivering quality audiences of quality content to agencies and advertisers in the programmatic space. They said: “We’re doing the right thing, not the easy thing.”
Doing the right thing for Ozone includes validating against UKOM-endorsed data the audiences that their publisher partners deliver. It turns out doing the right thing is going to make their lives easier too. In the first few days of activation, available and engaged audiences for one client had already grown by 15% and cost per unique user had fallen by 5%.
Rebecca Slack from Sky was explicit: innovation is in Sky’s DNA. The recently developed capability of Iris to measure audiences for Sky News and Sky Sports across more than 400 sites of their publisher partners is a game-changer.
When reporting YouTube audiences for Sky News and Sky Sports, Iris is providing “the richest source of audience-based data that Sky has”. That the Iris data innovations are also helping Sky model ad campaign reach and frequency in CFlight is a bonus.
Understanding real people
In a candid “fireside chat”, I spoke with Biren Kalaria from Google UK. He said that, as managing director of data measurement and analytics, he frequently logs in to Iris to explore detail of the YouTube data, now broken out and reported by around 100 organisations.
Kalaria also talked about what makes a good partnership. With partners like Sky and other UK broadcasters now using YouTube to extend their own audiences — particularly younger audiences — both Google and those broadcasters can see and benchmark the success of such strategies.
Agency partners can now plan their YouTube strategies with more confidence. Separately, I know several agency trading directors who have been salivating at the thought of being able to bring the data to the negotiating table this year.
Havas data product director Jordan-Lee Reddington gave us the presentation that I had been waiting for. He talked about a data landscape that is becoming “more complex, more black-box, more gated”. He revealed how he and his colleagues are determined to lift the lid on their agency’s data integrations for planning to “show clients something tangible”.
They subscribe to Iris because it is endorsed by UKOM and, in Havas Converged, they are aligning it with other quality datasets including Barb and Kantar TGI to deliver the most comprehensive audience dataset available.
What struck me as most reassuring was Havas’ commitment to putting humans at the heart of media and working only through a deep understanding of real people. Not IDs, devices, users or accounts. Real people. This is the essence of UKOM-endorsed data: people, not machines. As Jordan noted, the possibilities of using the Iris data are “diverse, endless and future-proofed”.
Governance in action
So…
Online audience data integrated into an agency planning stack: Tick.
Online audience data revealing the detail of YouTube consumption: Tick.
Online audience data extending video audience beyond YouTube: Tick.
Online audience data bringing audience validation to quality programmatic: Tick.
Real progress delivered.
I often hear people in our industry talk about the importance of governance — how we need to be sure that in audience measurement we are not marking our own homework. How we need to be sure that we are using only fully robust data and that we are acting with integrity.
It can, however, be hard to show governance in action or the tangible benefits of such governance.
On 21 November, our audience got to see the real benefits of governance by the industry, for the industry.
Ian Dowds is CEO of UKOM