Media Buying Briefing: The ANA’s cross-media measurement effort is taking too long say agencies

By Michael Bürgi

The Association of National Advertisers is nearly a year into its three-year effort to guide marketers, researchers, platforms, media companies and agencies to create a cohesive blueprint on cross-media measurement. But it’s not all rosy.

While media agencies applaud the noble aims of the marketer-led initiative — dubbed the Cross Media Measurement initiative (CMM) — some are frustrated with its pace of progress, criticize the effort’s funding model as benefitting the haves and penalizing the lesser, and are even skeptical that all parties will agree on the solution.

Other agency execs are less worried about timing and more about conflicting interests. “We have a lot of different groups, committees and forums going on on the same topic — and it’s really difficult when that’s going on to keep everyone on the same page,” said Brian Hughes, executive vp and managing director of audience intelligence & strategy at IPG’s Magna unit. “It has nothing to do with the nobility of the ANA’s effort, it’s just that when we have all these different things happening in silos, it’s very difficult to keep everyone on the same page.”

CMM is intended to reestablish unduplicated reach and frequency metrics on a campaign level for marketers, and to get the entire industry to agree or at least offer their input on the blueprint, said Nathalie Bordes, the ANA’s executive vp of measurement for marketers. The effort is supported by the World Federation of Advertisers, and has several research partners with which it’s testing various currencies and workflows at the table. Privacy-safe methodologies and granular first-party data measurement are at the forefront of the conversation, she said.

“At the moment, that’s just something where not a lot of the measurement efforts are focused on, but it’s the foundation,” said Bordes. “If you cannot count properly, how can you do all of these other amazing measurement initiatives?”

Initial results of the effort are on the horizon: findings of a test on reach and frequency curves using Videoamp will be available to the ANA in the next few weeks. And another two-part test with Comscore that fuses virtual IDs with personalized household data for another way into reach and frequency guidance is in the works, Bordes added.

“it’s like a good car, the first test drive is always fun,” said Bordes, who is German. “But then once you put it on the autobahn, you kind of need to see can it really perform?”

CMM is also finalizing an RFP selection process for a panel-based element to the blueprint. Although Bordes declined to identify any of the eight submissions, they appear to be the usual suspects: Nielsen, Comscore and Kantar, Digiday has learned.

Media agencies are playing along to ensure their input into CMM, but there are growing frustrations, not least of which is how it’s being funded. “The way they’re going about it is, the companies involved in measurement have to fund the research, which means Google has a disproportionate share or seat at the table because they are disproportionately …read more

Source:: Digiday