Video: How Do You Measure Ad Performance On New OTT Platforms?
In this excerpt from her Streaming Media panel presentation, comScore Transformative Media Measurement Executive Caroline Horner describes comprehensive methods for tracking, recording, mining, and assessing ad performance data from OTT content viewing as the task grows in complexity with the proliferation of new OTT platforms and services.
Learn more about ad performance metrics at Streaming Media East.
Read the transcript of the clip above:
Caroline Horner, comScore: Every time a new platform, a new wave, a new player comes in, we have to make sure that the data, the events are being recorded and passed around so folks can share the data and come up with it.
To do it fairly, there are two perspectives. You can have ads all over different contents, and you want to aggregate the view to it. The other side of it is the person, or the home. That is a different view of the content and the consumption. I think when you talk about the pendulum swinging back and forth between repackaging and dispersing, it is about that differentiation, between a person and a home.
A person decides for themselves all those different assets that they want to view, where a home is a container that is often associated with a single subscription, and different data points are related to homes versus people and devices. As you go to measure a whole home, you have twenty some-odd devices that you're trying to bring into a holistic perspective. The ideal is to do that in the home and follow those mobile devices when they're outside of the home and back.
It is incredibly difficult. We implement a policy where we say yes to every data point. If a partner wants to give us a data point, we say yes, and then we go to find the ones that we don't have. We get census-based tags, so if you put on the tags for your content, the census- based events are sent over to us. We also take streaming events, meaning all server-based events that come to us, and we'll make sense of that on a census level. We get the set-top box data, which is every single channel change, and we have the correlations to know what's happening there. For each player that comes down, we have every single SDK that goes in each of the players, so there's a lot going on.
The last thing is really panel-based, is trying to understand who is in front of that content, no matter what it is. We have over one million in the US, two million worldwide for our PC panel. Our mobile panel is in the tens of thousands, growing. I don't want to quote any numbers in case they're not public, and we have another, we have a TV panel as well, with 70,000 persons. This is a new project that we launched and have been public about, so it's not news to everybody. It's called Total Home Panel, and it's basically a router-sniffer. With the participants' permission, all the data that goes through the router is passed to us for interpretation. When you marry that data, which uses every connected device, to other data like ACR, which is basic automatic content recognition, you can see what's on, and how it was delivered, and marry that all together for a holistic view.
I know that's a lot, but it takes census-based, it takes streaming, and it takes panel and data-sharing. It takes more than a village to get the measurement.
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