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March 22, 2022 | Authored By
Consumer behavior has shifted more in the last ten years than the previous fifty. Audiences are watching more premium video content than ever before, but they’re watching it on linear, digital, streaming, and everything in between. In short, our viewers live in a cross-platform world. To reflect that reality and ensure marketing partners have the data they need to make smart investments, we must vastly improve our measurement capabilities across the board. That begins by harnessing the identity data that marketers need, and connecting it back to our measurement.
Today, NBCU announced that, in 2022, marketers will be able to do just that. Thanks to our game-changing partnership with iSpot, marketers can now leverage iSpot’s viewership data to activate cross-platform advanced audience media plans. That means we’re giving marketers the ability to measure their exact ads across all screens and enable their first-party audiences enriched with NBCUnified. And the best part is: we’re making this data all interoperable across OpenAP and other marketplaces.
This is a big step forward, but it’s not the only one we need to take. We must also evolve transactional measurement of unique audiences by building a more modern, interoperable, and expansive measurement framework. One currency, one metric, or one company can’t possibly capture all the ways people consume content. Rather, it’s going to take many innovative companies to count it all, measure it all, and deliver a complete, unified cross-screen view of the consumer.
Fortunately, some companies have already proved they’re up to the task. At NBCUniversal, we spent over nine months evaluating new measurement currencies and core enablers. We held an RFP process, received more than 120 responses, convened a Measurement Innovation Forum with participants from across the industry, released our updated Measurement Framework V2, and conducted a successful test-and-learn partnership with our first cross-platform certified measurement partner, iSpot.tv. And we’re doing it all with the goal of launching a new era of measurement.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce another milestone in our measurement journey. Today, we officially named 8 additional certifications across two key categories as part of our Certified Measurement Program.
At this stage of the process, we’ve focused exclusively on Audience Measurement and Audience Verification. And, as we head into the Upfront season, we wanted to make it clear that, at this moment in time, we will be transacting against our certified cross platform partner, iSpot.tv. However, these additional 8 certified companies play an important role in the interoperable ecosystem of currency, including streaming viewership capture, ad serving, audience verification and ad catalogues.
While we have a lot of confidence in the partners we have certified so far—this isn’t the end of the process. Our certifications aren’t permanent or set in stone. In a space as dynamic as measurement, companies must keep pace with consumer behavior. That’s why we’re encouraging all companies to keep innovating and—even if they were not yet chosen—to keep engaging with us.
This is just the first stage of our journey. Currently, we’re working hard at preparing the next iteration of our Look Book framework, which is focused on impact and business planning. In the coming months, we’ll start conducting evaluations, and we’ll announce certification decisions for the impact category by the end of Q3 2022 and business planning by the end of Q4 2022.
Ultimately, we’ve set our sights on shifting the way we transact to capture how our audiences consume the content they love, so we can drive the most impact for our advertising partners. This is the starting point of an entirely NEW measurement era. It’s about more than just new technology. It’s about a new beginning. For the first time ever, our advertisers can get a unified cross-screen view that provides a complete picture of their ad’s performance across all screens, in almost real time. And ready for action and transaction—right now.
We’re so grateful to all the companies who share in this vision—who took the time to detail their innovations and submit RFPs. We promise transparency and partnership will continue to guide our efforts as we try to build a better, more transparent measurement future.
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