‘I don’t know if it’s ever going to die’: Advertisers grapple with the GRP’s grip on the TV and streaming ad market

By Tim Peterson

The TV and streaming advertising industry is at an inflection point, and the gross ratings point — the decades-old measurement standard for TV advertisers to evaluate whether their campaigns reached enough of an intended audience — is at the center of it. Contradictory as it sounds, the GRP is at once crucial to the streaming ad market’s growth — and an obstacle as well.

Gauging an ad’s effectiveness according to how many people in a given demographic it reached is an imperfect approach. But it’s also a proven one. This is why streaming’s GRP equivalent, Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings, is seen by some ad buyers as important for connected TV ad sellers, such as Vizio and YouTube, to adopt in order to make TV advertisers more comfortable reallocating their dollars to the unproven medium.

However, this adherence to the GRP can curtail another shift in the TV and streaming ad market: from demographic-based buying that is the foundation of linear TV and is reliant on the GRP to the audience-based buying that has become the default on digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube and measures ads at the impression level.

Speaking at Digiday’s Future of TV Summit Live on Nov. 19, GroupM chief investment officer Matt Sweeney said that transitioning from the GRP-based buying to an audience-based approach is the first change that needs to take place in order for the TV advertising industry to keep pace with audiences’ shift to streaming. “It’s really around that [measurement] currency and the shift from buying demos to audiences,” he said.

Cara Lewis, evp and managing director of video investment at Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi, also supported the move from demographic-based buying to audience-based buying. “The demo GRP is probably something that we need to eventually move away from and talk more about our audiences because they are more effective,” she said in a separate session during Digiday’s Future of TV Summit Live. However, Lewis acknowledged that some advertisers will hold on to the GRP while others adopt impression-based measurement.

“The GRP, I don’t know if it’s ever going to die. Maybe it will. But I think some definitely believe it has more importance than others. I think moving to impressions is the way that we need to be looking at it,” Lewis said.

Surprisingly enough, though, some advertisers that were raised on impression-based measurement are now looking to the GRP. As digital-native advertisers, such as direct-to-consumer marketers, move money from Facebook and Google to TV and streaming, they are aiming to reach a wider base of potential customers than narrowly defined audience segments like left-footed dog owners. As a result, these advertisers are adopting the GRP as a guide by looking at their campaign’s reach and frequency metrics and how they connect to monitored business results, like website traffic and product sales.

“When you talk about a GRP, I know very simply I need to hit 50% of this population six times in a week in order to see my metrics rise. It’s a …read more

Source:: Digiday