Addressable's Measurement Conundrum. An Interview with Comscore's Prasad Joglekar

Following the panel I interviewed individual panelists to delve further into the discussion especially as how it will impact linear and remnant inventory measurementFor Prasad Joglekar general manager of TV and cross platform products at Comscore Addressable TV advertising can mean different things based on who you ask so he defined it for our discussion as quotAddressable TV advertising is the idea of replacing ads in a live broadcast content or the VODDVR version of such content such that each viewer of the stream could get a different tailored advertisementquotCharlene Weisler I am interested in knowing your overall view of addressable and whether it has changed or evolved over the past few monthsPrasad Joglekar Addressable advertising has long held a promise that each impression in a piece of content is individually tailored to the audience watching it thereby providing maximum value to the advertiser and minimum disruption to the consumer A part of this promise has been a reality with operators like Dish DirecTV and Altice who are all running profitable addressable businesses on their local 2 minutes However the expansion of these capabilities to national cable and broadcast networks amp8211 like ViacomCBS NBCU etc has been limited for a variety of technical and contractual reasonsOver the last 12 months or so amp8211 even before the pandemic amp8211 several advances happened First with the launch and rapid scaling of various DTC services like Peacock HBO Max and Disney networks have video distribution platforms that are at least notionally fully digital and addressable and owned directly by them Second various CTV providers have announced addressable programs though many are very much in their infancies This is again an offering directed at networks Third while legacy MVPDs continue to lose subscribers they have lost far fewer addressable homes Finally and perhaps because of the first three developments many operators and networks have either completed or advanced carriage dialogs that include addressable enablement and deliveryAll this has generated a renewed interest in the monetization potential of addressable at national scale And to properly monetize inventory the marketplace needs requires accurate trusted fairly priced and conflictofinterestfree measurement which Comscore is striving to provide to all participantsWeisler The question of measurement looms large especially in how we treat remnant inventoryJoglekar It does indeed In the legacy panelbased measurement systems overnight programming on many cable networks will have no rating A large MVPD amp8211 say with 20 of the market amp8211 will also have a zero coveragerating ie rating on the MVPD39s footprint on a latenight daypart on even a midsize network And if you are a station owner in a smaller market broad zero ratings from panels are a fact of life A direct effect of this is that adinventory in these instances will also get a quot0quot ratingIn these instances are we to believe that not a single soul is watching Of course not Rather it is that the panelinstrument used to measure is not sensitive enough to pick up the signal How is an adbuyer to justify paying nonzero dollars for a quot0quot metric How can a carriage deal ever fairly value a network that has multiple asterisks It is because of this conundrum that smaller networks get labeled as quotlong tail networksquot and overnight dayparts become quotremnantquotFrom a network39s perspective units that are low risk to enable for addressable test are the ones with zero or low ratings Increasing the yield on these is a great business idea Comscore39s longstanding and pioneering use of census settopbox based ratings measurement has brought transparency and insight to this content MVPDs have long used their view of Comscore39s data to negotiate the appropriate carriage fee for networks big and small equalizing them on a costpersecondviewed basis Networks local stations and MVPD adsales teams are also using this better data to demonstrate value and generate incremental salesWeisler Same too measurement of addressable in linear TVJoglekar Absolutely true When a spot is made addressable some homes watching that spot will be targeted for addressable delivery in that instant But the majority is not On average 30 of the impressions in a spot will be targeted So 70 of impressions are not targeted This phenomenon is generally true for all addressable spotsComscore calls these 30 of homes as quotAddressed Homesquot and the impressions naturally as quotAddressable Impressionsquot The other 70 of homes not targeted in that instant are called quotUnder Addressedquot homes and those impressions quotUnder Addressablequot The quotUnderquot comes from the fact that in many delivery systems the Addressable creative is quite literally overwriting the linear impressionThe Under Addressed impressions are seen as suspect or remnant After all if they were valuable someone would have bought them as addressable The advertiser who bought the linear spot and is only getting the Under Addressed impressions will naturally feel that they are being sold a broken product Absent some convincing information the only way to account for this is to place a very low bid on this Under Addressed spotThis valueloss problem is very real It can only be solved by decorating the Addressed and Under Addressed impressions with useful actionable audience attributes across all operators and insertion platforms Age and Gender is not an actionable audience After all if the Addressed Impressions took away all the 25 year olds and left behind all the 54 year olds in a spot it would still be a valid A2554 spot Would a buyer consider that a fair A2554 deal This is a measurement and transparency problem that Comscore is ahead in the marketplace with our thinking and solutionsWeisler What do you envision as the best methodology to measure addressable panel hybrid or amp8230Joglekar The lifecycle of an addressable campaign goes something like this The advertiser or agency creates a list of household IDs or device IDs that represent the audience of interest This list is matched to various operator or distribution footprints Then the addressable impressions are delivered to only those households in that list Typically at the end of the campaign households that saw impressions are matched up to nextperiod sales to do some attributionThis entire workflow is anchored around addressing each of millions of households that are of interest amp8211 from targeting to impression delivery to attribution It39s a little naamp239ve to believe that anything other than censusscale measurement will provide accurate and trusted measurement for these workflowsFurther the things that make Addressable TV interesting the quotbreakingquot of the live spot the delivery of multiple advertisements within the same unit etc are precisely the things that make it impossible to measure with a panel or as a traditional agegender rating as we discussed earlier Trying to shove what is inherently an impressionbased buy into a spotbased measurement scheme doesn39t work There39s very limited value panels bring to this equationWeisler What are the other challenges that you see regarding data and measurement in this spaceJoglekar The one additional one that I haven39t mentioned earlier is this For national addressability a 30sec unit must be individually enabled in 35 different operator and distribution platforms Each operator39s addressable insertion pacing and reporting stack is unique It is a hard and laborious process to measure each platform individually and then combine the numbers to create a true national viewWeisler Where do you see measurement in this space next year at this timeJoglekar I think the whole space will have evolved quite substantially We39ll see many pilots and beta programs being launched and their success or failure will be very instructive to all the players in the marketplace Some of the debates about panel vs census vs hybrid are like religion you can never decisively convince a nonbeliever Those will continue Economics of national addressable amp8211 for instance what is the price for the Addressed audience vs the Under Addressed Audience amp8211 will start to be concrete and will be benchmarkedClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Addressable's Measurement Conundrum. An Interview with Comscore's Prasad Joglekar

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