Quality check

The key hits:

• The cross-platform aspect of the ongoing measurement makeover may necessitate some way to take into account the quality of content.
• However, content quality is largely a subjective measure.
• A scaled approach may suffice, but a standardized measure seems unlikely.

TV’s measurement overhaul is all kinds of complicated. One of its biggest complexities, though, is the question of whether the quality of content should be considered when calculating the value and performance of an ad. If so, there’s the even trickier two-part question of not only how content quality can be quantified, but whether it can be quantified on the level of a measurement standard?

Spoiler alert: no one really knows at this point. “It is inherently a difficult thing to measure,” said Scott McDonald, CEO and president of the Advertising Research Foundation.

This three-headed hydra of a counting quandary popped up in February following NBCUniversal’s release of its “Measurement Framework Look Book.” Among the document’s 116 pages, one line on page nine sticks out: “We believe any new measurement standard needs to account for the quality of content, not only quantity of audiences.”

“We think that it’s really important that the industry talks about and thinks about the experience of a channel, the format of the content and ad length, all of which have different effects around how the consumer gets exposed [to an ad] but then creates impact to which the ways in which they respond to that message,” said Kelly Abcarian, evp of measurement and impact for NBCUniversal’s advertising and partnerships division, in an interview last month following the look book’s release.

The consideration of content quality seems to be cropping up due to the cross-platform nature of the current measurement makeover. Ad buyers and sellers alike are looking to not only update traditional TV’s measurement system but to expand it to account for the fuller spectrum of media channels, such as streaming and digital video. But this broadening can result in a flattening that would put an ad appearing in a TV show of equal value to an ad appended to a cat video.

So of course NBCUniversal wants content quality to be considered. The Comcast-owned media conglomerate spends a lot of money on content like prime-time shows and rights to major sporting events like the Super Bowl and Olympic Games. It wants an ad sold against that programming to be valued — a.k.a. priced — higher than some unedited, phone-filmed video posted to a platform like YouTube or TikTok.

And NBCUniversal is not alone in believing that content quality should be a consideration. An executive at another TV network shared the sentiment, as did an …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron