What I learned at CIMM East

Or the future of media measurement

It was another great day of networking and talking with the brightest and best in the industry in New York last week. It felt like a solid working event, trying to come up with solutions for the problems facing the industry.

AI was present throughout and I gave a heads-up for the upcoming CIMM research paper I’m writing on opinions and opportunities for AI in the industry. I’ll write more on that at a later date, but there were three other themes I noticed.

1. It’s going to be hard to fund four different currency providers.

2. Data (availability and quality) is still the most important issue

3. We haven’t grappled with how measurement looks in a programmatic world

Let’s tackle each in turn.

Funding multiple currencies

The self-professed “old man of the industry,” Howard Schimmel, talked through all the previous failed initiatives in alternative measurement, and it seems like the new measurement vendors are hitting crunch time. We’re now at the stage where people are trading off Nielsen, Comscore, VideoAmp, and iSpot, and the CEOs of all four of them were up on stage.

Normally, we’d expect them to take potshots at each other and attack each of their competitors’ poor service, but this week, they spent more time emphasizing just how much investment they’ve each made and how complicated it is to measure. I think they all realize there is an existential risk, and they need to work out how to play together in order to be successful.

Consolidation is likely on the horizon, and the combination of VideoAmp and Comscore looks pretty attractive. They both have non-competing currency services and there would be significant economies of scale on their data licensing costs. I would imagine iSpot is still taking a while to integrate 605, and any acquisition by Nielsen would likely be fraught with antitrust issues.

Data, data, data

Everyone’s pondering whether Walmart will continue to license the Vizio data post-acquisition, and the lack of data from the four big streamers (Disney, Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon) in the JIC is probably the biggest barrier to securing the funding to turn what is currently cross-industry collaboration into something more sustainable.

All the measurement vendors talked about the security of the supply of their data, but there is a nagging feeling that if Walmart stops providing data, it will be a big blow to independent measurement.

On the other side of the equation, there was a lot of talk about data quality issues in targeting, matching, and particularly in programmatic. The “70% of all your data is wrong” figure was bandied around a lot. This seems high to me, but there still doesn’t seem to be any solution in place to ensure that the quality of our “truck intender” segments really are truck intenders.

Measurement in a programmatic world

CIMM is kicking off a study into whether there should be a cross-industry watermark. The questions of identifying and measuring ads are about to become a lot harder with generative AI driving more creative variants than we’ve possibly been able to manage. This is going to make it very hard for measurement to keep up. Measuring unduplicated reach across multiple platforms is hard enough, how much harder is it if you’ve got hundreds of variants of every ad?

Digital programmatic is firmly measured by “grading your own homework,” and although the measurement industry is ready to provide gold standard measurement for programmatic CTV, it’s yet to be seen if the industry will be willing to fund it. For all the talk of sharing data, there are notable players on the sell-side who would love to be able to trade on their own measurement, and it’s going to come down to whether the sell side is willing to spend the TV levels of CPM without independent measurement.