digital video

Going Steady: How Long Will (My Cross-Media Campaign) Last?

Going Steady: How Long Will (My Cross-Media Campaign) Last?

Brian Pugh – Chief Information Officer, Comscore

Tania Yuki – CMO & EVP, Digital, Comscore



In this session, Tania Yuki and Brian Pugh of Comscore explored the impact of frequency and latency in cross-platform advertising effectiveness. In her opening, Tania demonstrated consumer trends and touchpoints to better understand cross-media, in terms of reach and optimizing platforms for specific outcomes. In her discussion, Tania acknowledged the challenges of measurement due to the constant introduction of new innovations and the adoption of new behaviors to track. She also recognized the considerable increase in connected devices per household since the pandemic. Tania pointed out complexities in the current media ecosystem from the increase in which media has merged despite being separate platforms (e.g., linear TV, social media, online video, etc.). In addition to all the changing behavior in media consumption, the speaker noted the emergence of Generation Z is beginning to change the rules for establishing brand love and loyalty. In his discussion, Brian examined findings from the measurement of 400 cross-platform campaigns to understand trends in terms of platform mixes. Brian noted the continued growth of social media and CTV along with the decline in linear TV, though he acknowledged linear still remained "king." Furthermore, he found that multi-screen campaigns performed better than single-platform campaigns.

Key Takeaways

  • The number of connected devices per household has increased from 9 to 12 since the pandemic, creating a more complex path in which to reach consumers.
  • Despite being separate platforms (e.g., linear TV, social media, online video, etc.) media is “inextricably commingled together,” leading to "context switching and about getting the right content to the right consumer."
  • In terms of long-form video, "Linear television is still the juggernaut in the room at 205 billion [viewing] hours." Total video across linear, CTV and digital grew 5% year-over-year in the U.S. CTV viewing increased by 14% of the total hours watched.
  • Short-form video continues to rise in popularity through Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. This trend in short-form video consumption is growing in double-digit percentages and redefining video consumption across mobile and connected TV screens.
  • The emergence of Generation Z is changing the marketer approach to brand love and establishing loyalty and building long-term value as their consumer behavior is in contrast to previous cohorts. This is specific to their lack of brand loyalty.
    • In terms of media consumption, Generation Z are heavy movie watchers (37%), preferring dramas (29%) and cooking shows (23%). Additionally, they expressed interest in local news and documentaries.
  • Social media is still growing (11%) but there are fewer linear TV households (-9%) as people are consuming media elsewhere and CTV has increased substantially (32%).
    • Though there was a clear decline in linear TV viewership, linear TV remains supreme regarding total viewership for one channel.
  • In terms of incremental reach over the length of a campaign, linear TV reached a lot of viewers in the early part of a campaign, but over time the study indicated "reaching incremental people on CTV and digital more often." This finding acknowledged the advantages of a cross-screen campaign in terms of optimizing reach.
  • Adding screens in a campaign improved brand lift but the variability of results also increased. Additionally, results for ad recall and other variables followed a similar pattern. It was noted that the optimal platform mix depended on the target audience.

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Decode Digital Video Attention by Environments in the Wild

Decode Digital Video Attention by Environments in the Wild

Bill Harvey – Executive Chairman, Bill Harvey Consulting, Inc.

Sophie MacIntyre – Ads Research Lead, Meta



This research has two main objectives: to establish if there is evidence for distinct environment types within digital media and to understand implications for use of attention metrics. The study focused on mobile “in the wild” test using simulated media environments conducted and analyzed by Realeyes in partnership with Eye Square and Bill Harvey consulting. The study scoped to video ads on six media platforms—Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Hulu, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube—and three environment categories—Feed (Facebook, Instagram, twitter), Short Form (Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat stories, TikTok Takeover, Feed and TopView, and YouTube shorts) and Stream (Facebook InStream, Hulu Pre and Mid Roll, and YouTube Skippable and Non-Skippable). Study was conducted in three stages: pre-exposure survey followed by in-context view (ad visibility, skips scrolls, on-screen attention and reactions) and then post-exposure survey (examining brand recognition, ad recall, brand trust, ad liking and persuasion). A number of constants were held: 1) isolating effect of creative; 2) holding audience constant through randomization and isolation (each person sees only one ad at a time). Main findings include:
  1. Across digital environments relaxation is the key mode.
  2. While attention norms vary between environments, brand recognition is comparable and delivers the same effect.
  3. There were similar results across the funnel across different format types—apart from ad recall.
  4. The effect of attention on brand outcomes differs across environments. More attention = higher ad recall and better brand recognition. Feed and short form environments saw the same ad recall with shorter average time and fewer long exposures.
  5. Marketers should tailor creative to take advantage of different second by second attentive profiles. In stream there is a more constant level of attention across creative—more time to tell the story. In Feed and Short Form—a conscious decision to concentrate your attention—you’re enjoying the fun of choosing; in stream it’s like being in the back seat of the limo. Less choice. So different types of attention.
  6. Across all environments, consumer attentive behavior decreases with increasing familiarity.
  7. When you do a study like this it is important to filter out those people who aren’t typically users of the platform. Newbies don’t know how to escape the ads.
In conclusion, effectiveness of attention varies across environment. Caution is needed in averaging across categories. Attentive behavior evolves across time. Open questions:
  • How can we distinguish between positive and negative attention? Perhaps through facial attention measurement.
  • How to understand forced vs. earned time?
  • What are the tradeoffs between attention, brand outcomes and cost?
  • How can we layer on emotion data and/or additional data?

Key Takeaways

  • There are different profiles of consumer behavior across environments.
  • Despite this, brand outcomes are comparable, suggesting each environment attains value in a different way.
  • Attention has a different relationship with outcomes across environments and users.

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Charting the Course for Third Party, Cross-Media Audience Measurement

Charting the Course for Third Party, Cross-Media Audience Measurement

Tina Daniels – Managing Director, Agency & Brand Measurement Analytics, Google

Nicole Gileadi – Global Product Lead, Google

In this session, Tina Daniels and Nicole Gileadi examined Google's principles for charting the course for third-party cross-media audience measurement. Tina acknowledged more third-party measurement companies were expressing interest in working more closely with Google, given their stature as the world's largest video provider. In her discussion, she acknowledged that this interest generated the need for Google to create a set of principles to offer to both measurement companies and key clients to guide the process. After reviewing these principles Tina and Nicole held an open discussion regarding these principles. Topics of the discussion included premium and high-quality content, long-form versus short-form video and the measurement of this content. In addition, Nicole touched on the importance of content and the context surrounding an ad. Other areas included the idea of exposure metrics (e.g., Where is my audience? Did I reach them?) in addition to providing signals to conduct an impact analysis.

The following are the five principles Google shared with the industry, to act as guidance for third-party measurement companies interested in working with Google:

  1. Google expects measurement companies to be comprehensive, meaning a holistic view of audiences across all platforms.
  2. Measurement should be fair and comparable.
  3. Privacy-centricity is extremely important. Only privacy-centric solutions can meet consumer expectations and be durable for marketers in the long term.
  4. Independent & Trustworthy, meaning both objective and transparent, ideally with third-party endorsement like the MRC.
  5. Measurement solutions must be actionable for advertisers.

Key Takeaways

  • The struggle that the advertising and marketing industry is currently having is that "there is no universal definition of content quality that is easily measurable in cross-media systems."
  • "Content quality is being used as this proxy for content impact." For example, "What is the impact of the content on my brand equity, my campaign objective, by marketing or business objectives?" All of these factors are specific to the marketer, the brand and the campaign.
  • When it comes to exposure metrics, advertisers and marketers should be consistently counting impressions across all channels, "because you need to count things to value them."

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$3 Trillion Sales Study Show TV Has Highest Quality Impressions

$3 Trillion Sales Study Show TV Has Highest Quality Impressions

Lloyd Darbonne – Senior Director Research, Insights, & Strategy, FOX Corp.

Bill Harvey – Executive Chairman, Bill Harvey Consulting, Inc.

Audrey Steele – EVP Sales Research & Strategy, FOX Corp.

Audrey Steele (FOX) introduced this presentation by highlighting the objectivity of the years-long study focused on the relative value of different platforms and impression quality, with the brands involved amassing close to $3 trillion in sales. While many in the industry are focusing on maximum reach, this study looked at sales as the most important measure of impressions, quality and value between media platforms. Bill Harvey (BHC) detailed the study’s methodology of implementing a standard multiple regression analysis with ROI optimization using SMI’s real ad spend numbers and Circana’s and S&P Global’s sales spend across the top ten brands in each of QSR, CPG and Auto verticals over nine years of data. Lloyd Darbonne (FOX) covered how the thousands of iterations of their ROI optimizer selected the media mix that predicted the highest share for each company studied. Concentrating on entertainment (inclusive of TV sports & news, TV cable entertainment, TV Big 4 entertainment and premium digital video TV), the optimizer then measured the optimal allocation for maximum ROI in each vertical. Results across verticals documented higher ROIs with significant reallocations and rebalancing of ad spends in TV and premium contexts.

Key Takeaways

  • Brands that increased their spend in non-premium digital lost sales and market share, much of it due to misallocation of advertising spend. There are opportunities for 20-40% ROI increases by reallocating non-premium digital dollars to TV.
  • TV has 2.6x the sales effect of non-premium digital. There is a 14.6% incremental sales lift added by advertising, on top of the baseline 85% sales without advertising. TV generated 69% of the added 14% across the combined three verticals, with non-premium digital at 27%. In all three verticals studied, broadcast entertainment still has a good amount of headroom—increasing share of ad spend will increase sales effects.
  • Buyer focus on CPM and rush to oversaturated lower-priced media and non-premium digital inventory has served to suppress the sales effects of overall campaigns.
  • Focusing on ROAS instead of reach, and using standard multiple regression analysis gives advertisers an advantage over slower-moving competitors.
  • For impressions quality, context still matters.

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The New State of TV

The New State of TV

Greg Dale – Chief Operating Officer, Comscore

Fifty years ago, defining TV was pretty simple but the video landscape has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. Video is growing today, and this is driven by CTV. TV formats have their own personalities and content to define them. TV should not be approached in isolation because that is not how consumers approach it.

Key Takeaways

  • The rapidly changing landscape: 70% of U.S households have at least one connected TV; Roku and Amazon are still among the top OEMs; 94% of viewing on linear is still live or same day.
  • Growth is due to the increase in streaming especially FAST which are having double digit growth. But how will the landscape unfold as, and if, the economy downturns. TUBI expects one in three streamers to reduce their channels.
  • There has been a rapid decline in pay subscriptions over the last 5 years from 66% to 43% with a concomitant rise in cord cutters. Cord-nevers have leveled off at 13% having risen to 20% in 2020.
  • COVID caused a rapid bump in viewing of TV and video, it retreated during 2021. But now we are seeing a renewed growth in the total amount of television and video. While there is a slow erosion, linear is still alive and well.
  • One important story is the growth overall of exposure to video through different channels such as gaming and social. But it is content as well as mobile availability that is driving growth. Nearly 50% of linear content consumed is news, sports and movies. However, movies have lost a 5% share over the last 5 years, no doubt the loss coming from the growth of SVOD.
  • Sports occupies a unique place in content. It accounts for more than half of all social media posts, and sports fans index at 124 for pay tv subscriptions.

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AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023

AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023

The ARF hosted its annual flagship conference, AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023, on April 25-26, 2023. The industry’s biggest names and brightest minds came together to share new insights on the impact of changing consumer behavior on brands, insights into TV consumption, campaign measurement and effectiveness, whether all impressions are equal, join-up solutions across multiple media, the validity, reliability and predictive power of Attention measures, targeting diverse audiences, privacy’s effect on advertising and the impact of advertising in new formats. Keynotes were presented by Tim Hwang, author of Subprime Attention Crisis, Robert L. Santos of the U.S. Census Bureau, Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, LLC and Andrea Zapata of Warner Bros. Discovery.

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Disruptive Streaming Video Ads Hurt Product Involvement/Brand Recognition

Disruptive Streaming Video Ads Hurt Product Involvement/Brand Recognition

  • JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Consumers may love online video platforms like YouTube, but when it comes to the inevitable disruption—the annoying mid-roll ads that start playing in the middle of a scene, sentence or word—they are not so amused. In fact, new research shows that the irritation caused by these ads leads to lower levels of product involvement and brand recognition than that garnered by non-disruptive ads.

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The State of Cross-Platform Metrics: The Advertiser’s Perspective

The State of Cross-Platform Metrics: The Advertiser’s Perspective

  • Cross-Platform Council Working Group

Metrics for planning, buying and evaluating buys have been in great flux, especially over the last five years. New channels have emerged, some have changed, and a multiplicity of data sources have sprouted up. To gain a better understanding of the way advertisers are navigating this complex landscape, the Online-Offline Working Group of the ARF Cross-Platform Measurement Council interviewed representatives from major advertisers and put out a report about what they learned. This report provides the advertising industry with a glimpse into how major marketers are approaching audience measurement in all the different environments.

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