The media companies looking to form a joint industry committee to create standards for audience measurement have formally invited media agencies to join the organization.
Letters were sent to all of the major agency holding companies Wednesday asking them to participate.
The JIC was announced a week ago to promote competition among measurement providers and establish multiple currencies for buying and selling $70 billion worth of advertising. The measurement business has been dominated for decades by Nielsen, which was acquired by a consortium of private equity investors last year and has just rolled out its own new cross-platform measurement product, Nielsen One.
In the letters, sent on behalf of NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Fox,
TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery, agencies are asked to nominate three people to participate in the JIC’s measurement certification council, which will help set industry standards. It is suggested that someone from the agency’s research, investment and audience activation departments be nominated.
Before the letters went out, media agency executives had said it was important that they be included in the JIC and some were concerned about the delay they perceived in getting details about how the organization would operate.
“We applaud the creation of the JIC and look forward to being invited with other holding companies to engage, advise and join the JIC formally,” Geoffrey Calabrese, chief investment officer at Omnicom Media Group North America, told Broadcasting+Cable. “It is our belief that only with the sell side and buy side working together as one can we arrive at standards that will be acceptable, used and trusted.”
GroupM executive director, research and investment analytics Bharad Ramesh added: “As the media ecosystem has evolved from linear to cross-platform, we all know that viewers are now consuming content across many platforms, channels, and screens. It’s important that, as an industry, we make an accurate and sustainable environment with standardized measurement capabilities.”
“GroupM welcomes all measurement initiatives that help make advertising work better for our clients and consumers,“ Ramesh said. “The formation of a JIC is a step in the right direction. As we evaluate the developments across currency and measurement, we must collaborate across the industry to solve the problems we all face. However, solving this problem requires a broader set of stakeholders working together, and while trust is important — verification will be required because so many inter-dependencies exist. GroupM is eager to work with the JIC to help drive the process forward and will continue to engage directly with all networks to better align their currency ambitions to real-life marketplace needs. “
Sources at the media companies involved said that they had informally kept buyers and measurement companies informed about their plans for the JIC and that the agencies shouldn’t have been surprised by the announcement.
“The formation of this programmer-led JIC was the first step of this initiative,” a JIC spokeswoman said. “Expanding on conversations with the ANA, the JIC has elicited participation from advertising agencies to give the buy-side a seat at the table in helping define the standards for new cross-platform currencies.”
The letter sent to the agencies states: “Our goal is to enable multiple currencies through the creation of a new measurement certification process that will establish the suitability of emerging cross-platform measurement solutions for transaction purposes on both demo and advanced deals in advance of the 2024 upfront and by creating a new unified streaming viewership dataset through OpenAP.”
It adds: ‘We believe that if we’re going to realize our collective ambitions of ensuring accurate cross-platform solutions for measuring premium video are available, we cannot do it alone. We want your feedback as we establish new standards for the future.”
Participants in the JIC will have influence over the standards and requirements for both demos and advanced new currencies, the letter said, as well as access to currency audit data during the certification process and results upon completion. They will also help with identifying use cases for the new streaming dataset. The JIC also offers agencies an opportunity to participate in the beta program of new digital data access service via the OpenAP Data Hub.
Pushback from Agencies
While everyone in the industry expresses interest in accurate and consistent measurement, there is some divergence in what the media companies want and what the agencies believe their clients are demanding.
To some on the agency side, the delay in providing details tarnished the start of the JIC effort.
“This could have been better managed,” said one senior agency executive who was surprised at the lack of immediate outreach to buyers and clients. “It’s not really a JIC without the buy side.”
Agency executives also questioned the nonparticipation of The Walt Disney Co. among the traditional media companies, as well as Roku and Netflix, which would certainly qualify as premium video, which is how the JIC is defining what it wants to measure.
Also: Premium Predicament: What’s Being Measured Is As Important Than Who Measures It
Nor are digital and social media giants YouTube, Meta, Snap and TikTok involved.
“For quite a few of our clients, they are part of the video plan,” a media agency executive said.
For clients targeting 18-to-34-year-olds in particular, social media is a critical part of the video buy, the executive said.
“You can't exclude companies from even being counted because the money has flown because consumers are there,“ the executive said. “It’s the job of the measurement company to count. It's the job of the agency and the media owners to agree on the value we ascribe to it.”
And while most media agencies are testing alternatives to Nielsen, it’s not clear they favor the multicurrency world media companies are postulating.
“We think competition is good,” the executive noted. “For us, it’s an extra cost because we now have to support three different systems, three different data sets, subscribe to them, and analyze them. So for us, having a multi-currency universe is a net negative.”
In most markets where JICs control media measurement, the JIC picks a single currency and a single provider, said veteran research executive Tony Jarvis, proprietor of the Olympic Media Consultancy.
Jarvis, who participated in a special meeting of the Advertising Research Foundation in 2005 that concluded that JICs didn’t violate antitrust laws, said that so far, what the media companies have formed is a media owner committee (MOC).
“No question that the sellers typically pay the larger part of the funding, but in JICs the ultimate control lives with the buyers,“ Jarvis said. “Typically, agencies, and in some countries, the advertisers, get very heavily involved.”
In most markets with a JIC, the JIC arrives at a single currency for a particular media and contracts with a particular provider to deliver that currency. That’s different from what the new U.S. JIC is aiming to do. Jarvis asked, “If you have multiple providers, is it a currency?”
Need for More Consensus
Jarvis said that in order to create a useful currency, buyers and sellers will have to come together on a number of fundamental issues, starting with the definition of an impression.
A lot of the big data used today is based on device usage — images being properly rendered on a screen.
It’s important to both media companies and to advertisers to measure real people paying attention to programs and commercials, Jarvis said.
“Maybe the base currency is persons with eyes on and ears on,“ Jarvis said. “We all use the terms seeing and viewing, yet a lot of people in the U.S. industry are using device measures. Whether it’s content or ads, the value is in my target group being properly and fully exposed. That would surely mean, at a minimum, eyes on or ears on, not just presence.” ■
