Resistance Is Futile: Embracing Change in Media Measurement

Or what I Learned at the CIMM NYC Summit

I had a great day today at CIMM’s NYC Summit. Amongst the talk of edit rules and deduplicated reach, it still seems to be all about the content.

Sports had its own session, and while the industry narrative is about the rise of streaming, sports continue to thrive as a broadcast experience. Cap Gemini shared that 62% of people leave streaming services once their series ends, only to return when the subsequent season drops.

It seems content is still the thing.

Linear TV fights back

Alison Levin (formerly Roku, now at NBCU) has (unsurprisingly) changed her view on linear TV, and there was the expected focus on how to make multicurrency work. Almost all agencies seem to be trading some proportion of their inventory on alternative currencies, but juggling all these metrics is challenging.

We didn’t get any numbers on the dollars traded through alternative currencies. Still, it’s clear that Nielsen remains the dominant currency, and I doubt more than 5% of ad dollars are currently traded on alternative currencies.

For GroupM, at least, Nielsen One looks to be the most prominent alternative currency to traditional ratings.

IP address is still the thing.

The identity resolution sessions focused on the dangers of relying on IP addresses for identity resolution, but they were dominated by vendors selling alternative identity graphs. Meanwhile, it seems to me that agencies and the sell side are entirely comfortable trading on IP addresses, and it doesn’t seem the industry is yet convinced that they need to shell out for alternative identity resolution.

Return of the watermark

Does anyone remember Project Oar?

With Nielsen universally deployed and Verance growing support, CIMM launched a new project to build the business case for a new, open watermark. With ATSC3.0 including a watermark standard, it would seem sensible to build on top of that, but as watermarking is an optional part of the standard, the industry will need to pay an incentive to get them to play ball.

Making certification work

George Ivie normally gets nothing but grief from the industry, as the MRC is probably the second most bashed organization. The last session took a refreshingly open approach to discussing how certification might look if the federal government regulated it differently and the chronic under-investment in certification.