News You Can Use

“Measure More Consumers, More Choices, More Screens” and “Children and Teens: Cross Platform Media Consumption”

• Posted: May 3, 2016

“Measure More Consumers, More Choices, More Screens” – ABC Television

ABC’s research findings will include:

Creating new ways of measuring all viewing across all platforms.

Better understanding reach, frequency, and time spent across the platforms.

How viewers reached on digital change the overall profile of the audience.

The impact SVOD services have had on traditional TV viewership.

Best ways for tracking and reporting multiplatform viewing.

 

“Children and Teens: Cross Platform Media Consumption” – RealityMine

Measuring media consumption of children and teens has traditionally presented challenges.  

In conjunction with Center for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), RealityMine partnered with TiVo Research, key family content media owners (e.g. Google, Viacom, Disney and Turner), and children’s manufacturers (e.g. Crayola and Lego) to measure, and deliver a thorough view of the total media consumption of these two key audience segments. 

 

“Ad-Receptivity: A New Metric for Improving Engagement” and “How Annoyance Impacts Ad Performance”

• Posted: May 3, 2016

“Ad-Receptivity: A New Metric for Improving Engagement” – Leflein Associates / Hulu

Technology is reshaping how audiences watch entertainment. Hulu commissioned research to measure the pervasiveness of ad-avoidance, what drives it, as well as to identify opportunities to maximize engagement for advertisers. Among the issues addressed:

How many viewers are avoiding ads at all costs?

What methods are being used to avoid ads?

Which viewers are more receptive to ads and why.

What drives ad-receptivity?

What types of ad experiences resonate with viewers across the ad-receptivity spectrum?

 

“How Annoyance Impacts Ad Performance” – Icosystem / Light Reaction

The authors put forward a hypothesis that, in order to elicit a reaction, an ad, even when it’s viewable, must cross several stages of Perceptual Pathway: first, we must notice it; then we must pay attention to it; next, we have a “gut” emotional reaction. Any ad that fails to cross any of these stages results in a lost opportunity.

Among the questions that will be explored are:

Are there observable differences in the subject’s behavior?

Do the subjects report being annoyed by the ads?

Do the subjects recall the ads shown?

AD BLOCKING /AD FRAUD

• Posted: April 26, 2016

Conference Paper – “Combat Fraud to Drive ROI” – comScore/Krug/Kellogg

Fraudulent and non-human traffic creates serious issues for all sides of the online advertising industry. While the common strategy of blacklisting domains can help advertisers reduce wasted impressions, it blocks potentially valuable audiences – hurting the reputation, yield and CPMs of the publishers involved – and only partially solves the problem for the advertiser.

Understanding the pitfalls of common approaches, we developed an automated system to manage invalid traffic at the impression-level, improving delivery beyond domain- and site-level blacklisting.

We will be sharing learnings to help advertisers, agencies and publishers combat fraud, reduce waste and ultimately improve quality of effectiveness research in digital.

From MediaPost (Accenture) – “Global Consumer Awareness of Blockers Reaches Critical Mass”

Accenture has released a global research study of ad blocking among 28,000 consumers in 28 countries. Fully 61% of respondents were aware of ad blockers, and 42% said they would pay to remove ad interruptions.

Gavin Mann, Accenture’s global broadcast industry lead, said, “The industry needs to do everything possible to make ads less of an infringement on precious screen time, by building on early successes that deliver targeted, relevant and entertaining ads.”

A notable takeaway was not to make the mistake of putting the majority of effort into fighting ad blocking; it’s an impossible battle to win. The company recommends focusing on moving the entire ecosystem forward and making advertising less invasive and more personalized.

 

 

CREATIVE

• Posted: April 26, 2016

Conference Paper – “Closing the Creative Loop in the Shift to Mobile” – Facebook 

What creative content will maximize impact? This paper summarizes 2 years of follow up work that was presented at ARF Audience Measurement 2014 — continuing to explore what aspects of creative matter as content consumption shifts to more mobile and video.

Combining Brand Lift studies conducted on in-market Facebook campaigns with creative testing data, we close the loop and identify aspects that create value. With this data set, we model how elements of both static and display ads predict business outcomes.

This research combines a large dataset of in-market testing, media delivery, meta-data and creative content ratings to further our understanding of how to optimize content to breakthrough in a mobile environment.

 

From AdAge – “Neuromarketing Exits ‘Hype Cycle,’ Begins to Shape TV Commercials”

For over two decades, Neuromarketing has intrigued marketers who believed that what people say is not always how they “really” think or feel. There’s evidence that Neuromarketing has finally turned a corner.

At the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re!Think conference, marketer Mars released findings on its study of 110 TV ads based on facial response and eye tracking from firm MediaScience. The results: biometric research predicts sales results better than traditional survey-based copy testing.

ESPN employed the same company to help make the case that marketers should consider a mobile ad “viewable” by consumers if it appears partly in view for just a half second, as opposed to one or two seconds.

Neuro-Insight joined Facebook in reporting brain activity that suggests campaigns combining TV and Facebook encode memories.

Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience now has 15 offices in 10 countries, with growing interest from big packaged goods, automotive and finance players, said Carl Marci, Nielsen’s chief neuroscientist and co-founder of Innerscope.

CBS Vision President David Poltrack observed that growing validation is boosting researchers’ confidence in using neuroscience techniques.

 

 

 

 

MEDIA RESEARCH

• Posted: April 26, 2016

Conference Paper – “The Purchase Journey: How do Radio and OOH Stack Up?” – iHeartRadio/SMG

In today’s time-pressed world, where consumers decide what and when to buy in decreasing time units, marketers are challenged to reach their target audiences at the most influential moment.

SMG and iHeart Media collaborated on research to better understand which media types and vehicles can impact  consumer decision-making by examining the data signals that consumers share during their path to purchase.

Through an analysis of the SMG proprietary global consumer panel, PACE, we examined the relationship between media exposure and category consideration and purchase, giving insight into the role of different media channels during that journey, and how it varies by category and by target audience.

From MediaPost– “The Key to Audience-Based Metrics: Testing, Testing and More Testing”

“Science needs validation,” said George Ivie, CEO of the Media Rating Council. The event was the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) Cross-Platform Media Measurement and Data Summit last week.

That perspective seems to align with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). In a primer the association released on improving ad viewability, they outlined strategies for working with third-party vendors or using an internal measurement system as a “source of truth” that can be used as a baseline and in testing.

 

 

TARGETING

• Posted: April 26, 2016

Conference Paper – “Out of Home Advertising at Scale” – IRI

IRI had already collected empirical metadata that indicated significant underestimation of OOH impacts, especially for retail and consumer goods (both CPG and durable).

We now have leveraged a trade-area based approach to more accurately measure OOH by making the distance from OOH location to point-of-sale.

In order to understand how this localized impact model performs vs. the industry standard Market-level model, we ran a side-by-side comparison of both approaches across a cross-section of brands representing multiple categories including Beverages, Home Care, Snacks and Personal Care. Results will be presented at the ARF conference.

From Adweek: Article in the News – “Twitter Is Making It Easier for Big Brands to Target Smaller Groups”

Twitter is adding sublayers to ad campaigns. The goal is to make it easier for larger brands to better target and monitor advertising on their platform.

Twitter product marketing manager Andrea Hoffman wrote, “One campaign can have many ad groups, and an ad group can have many targeting criteria and creatives. This level of granular control helps advertisers improve how they measure results, set promotion schedules, test different audiences, and identify which Tweets work best.”

 

MULTI-SCREEN INSIGHTS

• Posted: April 26, 2016

Conference Paper – “The Economics of Attention: TV Ads That Trigger Sales” – Harvard/Tvision

Television commercials have always needed to capture the audience’s attention before communicating their message. Sometimes the TV is turned on in people’s homes as background noise, e.g., “the second screen” while our smartphones have become “the primary screen.” How should advertisers and their agencies adapt to this growing concern and create TV commercials that work when consumers are looking at the TV but not focusing on the brand message, or are not looking at the TV, or worse, aren’t even in the room?

The presenters will reveal findings on what ads get people to pay attention to the TV screen in 2015. And how they are fundamentally different from successful ads of 5 years ago.

From Broadcasting&Cable – “comScore Sends Clients First Cross-Platform Ratings”

The company said the ratings are based on fully integrated panel and census-based data sets and span linear TV, time-shifted TV, video-on-demand and digital viewing.

The ratings data goes back to the Fall of 2015 and is based on 37 million TVs for linear viewing, 117 million TVs for VOD and digital data.

“People are consuming content in smaller and smaller slices, and our clients want to know every opportunity they have to reach those individuals regardless of where, when and how they’re watching,” said Caroline Horner, SVP at comScore.

Both comScore and Nielsen have promised to produce syndicated cross-platform measurement products this year.

“It’s great to see the newly merged comScore move rapidly in this direction, and I look forward to seeing their preliminary data,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, EVP and chief research officer at Viacom.

 

NBCU Offers Guarantees Based on a Variety of Metrics

• Posted: April 19, 2016

A fundamental element in the TV Upfronts has been use of a simple metric. Nielsen audience data, i.e. ratings generated by age/gender, have almost always been the sole basis for negotiations.

But increasingly, new metrics have taken hold.  NBCUniversal says it will guarantee “the targeted delivery of optimized investments as the exclusive currency” with “select” marketers.  Among the components under consideration are advertiser’s first-party data, information from movie-centric subsidiary Fandango, viewership collected from Comcast (parent company of NBCU) set top boxes and other third-party research.

NBCU is not alone. Fox Networks Group, among others (e.g. Viacom) have said recently that it will offer guarantees for advertisers using first-party marketers’ research and other sources.

Changes are underway.  Nevertheless, observers are saying that, during the upcoming 2016/17 Upfront, Nielsen reported ratings will still serve as the primary source for the negotiations of tens of billions of dollars of commercial inventory.

Upbeat Upfront Predicted for Broadcast

• Posted: April 19, 2016

This year’s broadcast TV upfront will likely dramatically reverse three years of declining upfront volume with rising revenue and higher pricing according to this TVNewsCheck article by Wayne Friedman.

CPM prices are expected to rise 7% to 9% according to media estimates.  Additionally, a rise in total dollar volume, up 3% to 4% overall, to $8.7 billion is forecasted.

These positive projections about the 2016 Upfronts are based on the current scatter market according to this article.  The sharply higher scatter revenue is a result of higher spending by pharmaceutical, food, and automotive marketers.

Friedman also points out that the concerns about digital media by media executives, who have questioned the poor viewability of digital video ads, issues of fraud and ad- blocking by consumers, have benefited the broadcast and cable networks

Geri Wang, President of Advertising Sales and Marketing, ABC Television Network commented on the upfront market, “It’s a strong marketplace; there looks to be more money in the overall TV economy.”  She added, “Advertisers still seek high quality.  People still care about premium TV and premium video.”

The Growing Case Against Holding the Upfront

• Posted: April 19, 2016

Toni Fitzgerald addresses the TV upfront in this Media Life Magazine article and discusses the relevancy of the upfront in the digital age.

Among the factors impacting the upfront:

-New technology including programmatic.

-The evolution of television viewing.  Since viewers watch TV on their own schedules, across different devices, the fall premiere model may no longer be relevant.

-There are fewer must-buy shows on broadcast

-Some advertisers, such as General Motors and Procter & Gamble, have pulled out of the upfront or sharply cut their buys.

-Some networks are eliminating their upfront presentations.

Fitzgerald concludes, “For the next few years, the upfront will continue. But for how long after that is really anyone’s guess.”