NBCUniversal Boosts Measurement Team in Push Towards Alternative Currencies

NBCUniversal believes the future of measurement lies in alternative currencies, and it's making investments to prove it. The company hired Maggie Zhang as svp, measurement strategy and operations, coming over from Amazon Ads. Zhang’s addition to NBCUniversal is part of the company’s plan to move into the next phase of its Measurement Certification framework. “Coming from the buy-side, a lot of advertisers and marketers are eager to have this holistic view across all the platforms they’re buying, especially the biggest ones between linear and CTV,” Zhang told Adweek. “How to understand reach and frequency, especially to better manage frequency on both linear and digital sides, that’s exactly what we want to achieve through better measurement. Unifying these platforms and measure and deliver results faster, that’s really our North Star, and that’s exactly where our priorities lie.” In June, NBCUniversal and iSpot.tv completed a test of alternative measurement, which the companies said was the largest in the industry. They also included certified audience measurement and audience verification earlier this year. NBCUniversal is measuring the quality of impressions across seven categories: viewability, invalid traffic, completion rate, audible rate, attention index and, most recently, emotional resonance scores. Currently, the company is getting ready to open up the certification process for the first two categories with nine certified partners. “We’ve done a lot of work over the last 12 months really looking at categories three through six, knowing that we just introduced that seventh category at Cannes,” Kelly Abcarian, evp, measurement and impact, advertising and partnerships, told Adweek. “We look forward to continuing to bring the NBCU certification lens to the partners that we’re going to work with, across counting all the way to impact.” Zhang, who reports to Abcarian, predicts that CTV ad spend will more than double over the course of the next four years. “This is really showing the market demand as marketers are following exactly where the consumer is headed to,” Zhang said. “Specifically for NBCU, together with a lot of publishers, after many years we’re ready to have first-party ownership of our consumer data from a consumption and time-spent perspective. We’re able to gain deeper insights, and we’re really able to leverage the data to refine and better improve measurement.” NBCUniversal and iSpot Complete ‘Largest’ Industry Measurement Test For the team at NBCU, this means that measurement can be improved in a way that's not just limited to a small panel, but the company can move to census-level data to further enhance measurement and planning. That census-level data and further enhancement is one of Zhang’s biggest priorities in her new role. NBCUniversal’s measurement certification partner program includes brand measurement across KPIs. Metrics include brand awareness, favorability, consideration, purchase intent, loyalty and advocacy. The company has been working with iSpot.tv since 2014, when it was one of the early networks to subscribe to verified impressions after the measurement company first commercialized smart TV data. “Come 2024, there’s going to be 100% new currencies,” Abcarian said. “Measurement is absolutely on every upfront agenda because we all have to change and work together on which to execute the change.” A change in currencies NBCUniversal is far from the only publisher looking to develop alternative currencies. For instance, WarnerMedia tapped iSpot.tv, as well as Comscore and VideoAmp, as the three measurement companies for the first tests of its own measurement alternative. Paramount, meanwhile, is partnering with VideoAmp and Dentsu on data trials this quarter as it also explores alternate currencies to Nielsen. And Comscore has created its own unified measurement offering—Comscore Everywhere—to compete with Nielsen’s upcoming Nielsen One. “We’re going to transition from test and learn into the ability to truly operationalize multiple currencies,” Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the Video Advertising Bureau, told Adweek. “We’ve had variety in measurement, which has been terrific. The next stage is to essentially do the work to operationalize it all the way upstream at the beginning of the pre-planning process throughout the transactional process.” “We’ve got to be able to enable the ability to have multiple currency choice at the beginning of the process and something that comes out that is a look at de-duplicative to the campaign basis that’s reconciled to identities,” he added. When the industry gets there, then companies can track performance, including brand lift, sales lift and both harder and softer outcome metrics. “All these partnerships have been eye-opening for clients,” Cunningham said. “The end game is to have advertisers be part of a rapid learning process. Publishers who have gone from test and learn with a handful of clients that are already moving to test and learn with two, three dozen plus clients. They’re proving sales success and brand success. That’s why you’re starting to see this multiplicity coming out of these partnerships.”