Content-level SVOD-AVOD measurement may not be coming anytime soon, but it’s something the industry is working on.
VAM, Numeris’ cross-platform video consumption measurement platform, gathers data from its household digital panel to capture all Canadian broadcast channels as well as all SVOD and AVOD – including YouTube and more recently, TikTok. For streaming, it reports time spent on the platform, the time of day, the device used and the demographics of the people viewing.
But what VAM can’t do yet is identify the content being watched.
Now that Netflix is offering an ad-supported subscription tier with other providers expected to follow, the need for measurement is becoming more pressing. In the U.K., Netflix has signed with British TV ratings agency Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB) which will measure its daily streaming numbers, monthly reach and share of total identified viewers.
Chris Williams, CMO of Arima Data, says what no one is doing is looking at the bigger picture of measurement in the U.K. market and comparing its two initiatives: BARB’s Project Dovetail and Incorporated Society of British Advertisers’ (ISBA) Project Origin. “If Dovetail is doing such a great job, why are the U.K.’s advertisers developing Origin? I doubt that buyers care very much about the ratings on Netflix’s SVOD service because there aren’t any ads there, and even if they are curious about ratings on the ad-supported area, then they need to concern themselves with the audience of the dynamically placed ads, not content, bought on an impression currency.”
Origin is funded by stakeholders to create a standardized cross-media measurement approach designed to address the needs of advertisers to plan and understand campaigns across digital and broadcast platforms. In the U.S., Netflix has formed a partnership with the Nielsen One solution that is scheduled to launch in January but not on the content side, on the advertising campaign measurement side.
Catherine Malo, SVP of cross-media business development and marketing at Numeris, says that to be able to capture program-level information and eventually differentiate between the subscriptions with ads vs the subscriptions without ads is on Numeris’ radar. “Right now, Netflix doesn’t share any of their internal info to any measurement company. To have access to program level information we would need to be able to access their data, either through tagging or encoding server to server information. So sometime down the road we will need to be able to differentiate AVOD – right now it’s not doable without Netflix sharing their data.”
To work towards a solution that would benefit advertisers, the Canadian industry has formed a new group called IMAG (Industry Measurement Advisory Group), led by co-chairs Jennifer Holgate of the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA) and Catherine MacLeod of ThinkTV, who are managing this committee on behalf of industry associations. Numeris, amongst other industry representatives, is participating in this committee.
