For generations, a single standard has existed for measuring the vast home audience of couch potatoes and transacting television ads that today total $70 billion a year.
But as millions of viewers peel away from their TVs and migrate among flat screen, online and mobile video, it's clear the simple Nielsen rating system is not going to be enough.
Indeed, the quest for a “single-source” rating -- media’s “Holy Grail,” as NBC Universal's president of research and media development Alan Wurtzel calls it -- is swiftly gaining steam, including a major industry initiative jointly announced earlier this week by three top advertising trade groups.
Without such a standard authoritative measure, say content and advertising executives, the media and marketing world will remain handicapped in buying and selling ads, pricing media and programming video against the multiplatform audience.
“It is time for the industry leaders to develop a ‘currency’ that is widely and consistently accepted and adopted,” said Bob Liodice, CEO of Association of National Advertisers, one of the groups.
Generally, the media ecosystem now operates as often as not on guesswork or has few options beyond relying on a less-than-perfect rounded picture “fused” from disparate tracking data on individual platforms.
The explosive platform now is the Internet. Last year, a monthly average of 179 million Americans watched video online, according to media tracker ComScore. In December alone, online viewing sessions rose 13 percent to 5.8 billion as Americans on average American spent more than 14 hours in front of a record 201 streamed videos.
The audience for just one streaming service, Hulu, racked up almost 30,000 minutes of video viewing in last year’s fourth quarter compared with less than 20,000 minutes combined for the top five broadcast network, Comscore reported.
Advertisers long to know with far more precision the total reach of a campaign, whether an ad was seen repeatedly by the same person or not across a proliferation of platforms, from the flat-screen TV and desktop PC to the laptop and game console to the smartphone and tablet.
Media companies, meanwhile, are craving for a single authoritative count of total unduplicated multiplatform audiences, too. “If you can measure three-screen audiences, you can evaluate and sell them” to advertisers, NBCUl's Wurtzel told TheWrap.
To serve consumers better, content giants also want to confidently grasp the interplay among platforms.
“We make all of this content for consumers, and know it is being consumed on these platforms, but we have little visibility into precisely whose doing what,” Colleen Fahey Rush, chief researcher for Viacom’s MTV Networks, told TheWrap.
Adds Peter Seymour, strategy and research executive vice president of Walt Disney Co.'s Disney Media Networks: "I think there’s a lot of work to be done in that space.”
Dubbed “Making Measurement Make Sense,” the initative announced last week by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies is aimed at giving birth to a standard.
The multiplatform-ratings status quo is “cacophony of competing and contradictory measurement systems,” the trio of groups stated.
