The Association of National Advertisers said that the VAB, representing TV networks and distributors, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, have joined the ANA’s Cross-Media Measurement initiative.
The initiative aims to create a transparent system of measurement that restores essential metrics of campaign measurement and provides complete measures of all ad exposures, including deduplicated reach and frequency across all platforms.
It is also one of the challenges faced by Nielsen, which is trying to modernize its measurement systems to deal with viewing on multiple screens while facing growing criticism for undercounting traditional TV audiences.
Just this week, Nielsen told clients a software error resulted in some out-of-home viewing not being included in its national ratings. And ViacomCBS objected to Nielsen’s plan to include broadband-only homes in its local ratings service.
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Earlier this year, Nielsen’s national ratings service lost its accreditation from the Media Rating Council–the industry’s seal of approval. That has emboldened Nielsen clients to seek alternative, up to date measurement options and encourage rivals to step up.
Advertisers, who pay a lot of the bills in the TV business, want to know that the dollars they spend are being seen by the consumers they want to reach and that their commercials are producing a return on investment.
“The VAB is extremely pleased to be joining a terrific group of top U.S. marketers in their quest for higher order cross-media measurement through the ANA’s CMM initiative,” said Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the VAB. “I believe 2022 and 2023 will be marked by seismic advances in sophisticated media performance metrics that give us all multi-dimensional insights on how brands grow across major video media options, and I’m convinced that real collaboration among top marketers, the media and the agencies will be the force that moves measurement mountains.”
“Cross-media measurement has been a significant industry barrier for years,” added 4As President and CEO Marla Kaplowitz. “The 4As and its members are committed to the ambitions of CMM and look forward to partnering to identify solutions to better understand the effectiveness of media investments.”
The ANA’s initiative intends to pilot a technical solution in 2022. It aims to build a privacy-preserving infrastructure that collects first-party ad impressions and content data for measurement purposes. The objective is to preserve the privacy of audiences and related data while enabling granularity of measurement for stability and longevity as media choices evolve.
“I wholeheartedly welcome VAB’s and the 4As’ participation in this important project,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice. “Our CMM project is designed to unify stakeholders spanning the entire advertising ecosystem and the success of any cross-media measurement initiative depends on the cooperation and collaboration of each sector involved in the equation. With this move we have made a major step in achieving that goal.” ■
