OpenAP Unveils Cross-Platform Measurement Framework for 2022 Broadcast Season

As streaming and on-demand viewing has grown in popularity, viewers are increasingly choosing to watch shows and view ads on cellphones instead of—or in addition to—their TV screens. Eluding marketers for years, though, have been the tools necessary to understand how viewers on linear TV, addressable TV and digital streaming platforms relate to one another, and who may have seen an ad campaign multiple times. The advanced TV advertising platform OpenAP, which works with most of the major TV networks to streamline TV buying and reporting across companies, is today rolling out a new framework aimed at dulling that pain point and making cross-platform targeting and measurement more transparent and more able to identify duplicate audiences. The framework, called XPm, is designed to offer a single, central hub for marketers who want to understand how campaigns performed across platforms using OpenAP’s common TV audience identifier, OpenID, which the company announced earlier this year. XPm is designed to facilitate cross-platform reporting on campaigns that run across various platforms and on various networks and publishers by giving content providers a way to share campaign exposure data to third-party measurement companies. Advertisers using OpenIDs for their campaigns will be able to receive post-campaign reporting insights from XPm that include information such as deduplicated unique cross-platform reach, total cross-platform impressions and average ad frequency. In other words, explained OpenAP CEO David Levy, marketers “will have the ability to use a consistent audience across all of these linear, digital and addressable environments and have the measurement data at the backend spit out a number so you can know, on a deduplicated basis, how many people you reached within your audience across all platforms.” ‘The time is now’ The framework is not meant to serve as a measurement alternative on its own, but instead serves as the connecting tissue from networks to measurement companies. Companies like Comscore, iSpot, Nielsen, VideoAmp and 605 will be integrated into the framework and will report based on the data coming in. (The ad-tech company Innovid will also offer enhancements to certain digital measurements to use in XPm reporting.) “We set up all the pipes to enable multiple measurement companies to get data on a campaign-by-campaign basis,” Levy said. XPm has the backing and participation of the major networks, including ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, Fox, Discovery and WarnerMedia, and campaign activity across all national networks is included as the tool debuts, Levy said. “We've been working with all the national networks on a framework that we can proactive approach to answer the call around cross-platform measurement to both the ANA, to all the agencies,” Levy said. “We realized that the time is now.” There are still kinks to be worked out. The Video Advertising Bureau, the industry group that most recently led the crusade to de-accredit Nielsen’s national TV ratings service, is working to develop a set of common standards and guidelines as to how data is used on behalf of the involved TV publishers, Levy said. But the tool provides a step in the right direction as the industry has repeatedly called for clearer measurement options that reflect the reality of consumers’ media consumption, and agencies are raising their hands to get involved. Levy said there was “incredibly strong demand on the buy side” to get the framework out into the open, and GroupM, Dentsu and Horizon Media participated in beta testing of the framework this fall. All three, Levy said, are already actively measuring Q1 campaigns using XPm. "Measurement that keeps pace with our industry's rapidly changing shift to on-demand consumption and addressable advertising can only be scaled when buyers and sellers get behind an idea and support it," Matt Sweeney, GroupM’s North America chief investment officer, said in a statement. "OpenAP’s OpenID and XPm solution is a critical step in enabling true cross-platform measurement and audience delivery a reality for our clients."