Joint Industry Council Reveals How It Will Grade Measurement Companies Seeking Certification

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The Joint Industry Committee looking to create standards for measuring television viewing has come out with the scoring system it will use to evaluate measurement companies seeking its certification.

Members of a JIC subcommittee, with half of its membership consisting of buyers and the other half of sellers, identified nine areas it considers important in evaluating how ready a measurement company is to provide currencies for making media transactions.

Joint Industry Committee Update — (Image credit: Joint Industry Committee)

The areas have been weighted, with transparency and privacy getting the most weight.

Each area will get a score, with “best-in-class” companies meeting all of that area’s requirements and getting 4 points. Being “transactable,” but not best in class, is worth 3 points. Being not transactable but approaching currency grade is worth 2 points, and non-transactable and just starting to meet requirements is worth 1 point.

The scoring system will be used to evaluate Comscore, InnovidXP, iSpot, SambaTV, VideoAmp and 605, all of which applied for certification by the JIC.

Nielsen in April declined to participate in the JIC’s certification process. Nielsen said there were legal, operational and scientific issues that needed to be resolved before it would sign up, calling the process “well-meaning” but “rushed.”

The JIC also announced details of the timeline for the streaming data service it is putting together from contributions of the participating media companies.

All publisher base-level viewership and ad impression data will be available within the Federated Data Clean Room by the start of broadcast year 2024. Between broadcast-year start and calendar year 2024, measurement companies will work on and propose templates in anticipation of production use.

The JIC’s streaming data service was developed on top of a purpose-built Federated Data Clean Room architecture that can operate on published Census-level data in a privacy-centric way. The SDS enables blinded access to programmer first-party data to produce audience-aggregated data packages for use in planning and measurement.

Jon has been business editor of Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He focuses on revenue-generating activities, including advertising and distribution, as well as executive intrigue and merger and acquisition activity. Just about any story is fair game, if a dollar sign can make its way into the article. Before B+C, Jon covered the industry for TVWeek, Cable World, Electronic Media, Advertising Age and The New York Post. A native New Yorker, Jon is hiding in plain sight in the suburbs of Chicago.