Analyst Jessica Hogue says the time has come for marketers to set aside the GRP and make the leap to impressions. Why? Because impressions make the valuation equal and uniform across channels, setting standards for a more holistic, intelligent and balanced measure of campaign success.
Television measurement has been done through two distinct approaches. The first, adopted by more traditional television marketers, relies on gross rating points (GRPs) to evaluate and buy inventory to meet marketing goals. The second, brought on by the evolution of streaming behavior, evaluates based on the standard for digital audience measurement: impressions.
More and more, marketers must straddle these two methods to gain a complete picture of how their media mix is performing. But when forced to operate on both tracks simultaneously, marketers cannot get a clear view of their overall media strategy or its impact on the bottom line.
The GRP falls well short of the robust and highly detailed impression data available across most digital media. These technical drawbacks make GRPs especially cumbersome for marketers aiming to build cross-channel or omnichannel campaigns.
TV content is increasingly served in a fully addressable and measurable format and so media buys can be delivered on connected devices. For marketers, this changing dynamic opens a dramatic expansion of new and clearer-cut forms of measurement for even the largest television campaigns.
Advertising video-on-demand (AVOD) opportunities are expected to lift U.S. revenue for online video advertising. These AVOD platforms are consumed like traditional television and are increasingly viewed on the same screens as linear TV. The platforms are not only expanding the TV category but, as a bonus, are creating new ways to measure and understand TV audiences along the way.
The rise of connected television is allowing digital-first marketers to bring more robust metrics and precise measurement, in the form of impressions, to campaigns that operate at a scale only TV can offer. This, in turn, is enabling teams to eliminate data silos and make more informed decisions about the performance and impact of their messaging across all media channels.
To bring that future closer, marketers must set aside outdated measurement tools like GRPs and embrace modern measurement techniques that allow for evaluation of campaigns as they’re created today.
Source: Hogue, J. (2020, August 18). Are Impressions the Answer to Fragmented TV Measurement? ANA.