As TV viewership continues to fragment across screens and devices, measurement must evolve to meet the needs of a complex TV landscape. Various players such as The Trade Desk, OpenAP and iSpot are actively developing their own measurement currencies to connect the dots across linear and digital.

But even once those currencies are created, advertisers will have a lot of questions about how to put these tools into practice: Which currency is most accurate? Which one can they transact on consistently? What if their partners don’t use that currency?

A recent Deloitte report that surveyed 50 industry executives found there to be considerable apprehension around the move to multiple currencies. Advertisers are worried that:

• networks are only in favor of currencies that make their inventory more valuable;
• agencies will have to pay more without seeing an impact to their ROI; and
• marketers would get on board because undercounting audiences could be beneficial to them.

What advertisers need now is interoperability. They need to connect linear and digital TV in a way that allows them to seamlessly plan, target and measure their campaigns, regardless of currencies. If TV players transact in silos and fail to develop a more open ecosystem, everyone—including publishers, tech platforms and advertisers—will lose.

One potential solution has been in front of advertisers this whole time: modernizing household measurement. By reexamining what household measurement should look like for today’s IP-connected household, advertisers can achieve the interoperability needed to meet the needs of the evolving streaming landscape.

Evolving the “household” 

To some, the household may seem like an outdated metric for TV measurement. It summons the image of the traditional nuclear family gathering around the big screen in an era before the inundation of various devices, channels and streaming services.

The household is an important metric for TV advertisers, and players in the industry must take action to ensure its longevity.

Indeed, household measurement first started as a way to gauge viewership on linear television. Panel data extrapolated from a sample audience and converted to “ratings” was pretty much the only metric that broadcasters—and marketers—used to plan their campaigns and measure performance.

But as TV evolved, this standard didn’t evolve along with it. The question of who was watching specific content within any given household remained largely unanswered.

The rise of streaming allowed individuals to consume content via IP-enabled devices. While marketers could now access more granular viewership data without the need to extrapolate from a sample size, it also made it increasingly difficult to match users across their various devices.

But that’s changing. With programmatic TV, marketers can create linkages between IP and device-level IDs, enabling them to gain a holistic picture of viewership among individual users in a privacy-protected way. And advances in technology are making this easier to facilitate. With the rise of clean rooms, this IP data and any other sensitive data remain protected yet can still be matched for various use cases across platforms. By integrating data sets to have a better understanding of viewership, advertisers will be able to plan their campaigns with greater control over reach and frequency.

As the household takes on a more data-driven meaning in the streaming era, marketers can leverage its evolved measurement capabilities to find, target and reach audiences at scale. By connecting consumers with their viewership behavior both inside and outside the home, the household becomes a source of truth through which marketers can create a unified vision of TV performance, despite the challenges of a fragmented environment.

Technical capabilities required to measure the modern household

The cornerstone of household measurement is the device graph, which links users with their devices in a privacy-compliant manner. Blending data from multiple sources to create a robust device graph empowers marketers to better understand household attribution while also informing optimized ad spend on TV.

But not all device graphs are created equal. For media buyers, the more a platform can layer strategic data sets, surface audience insights and apply historic learnings in real time, the more they’ll be able to optimize spend. This will enable brands to reach the right viewers by understanding how their devices fit into the larger household.

When it comes to attribution, the nature of a household TV is tricky. In contrast to traditional digital advertising, there’s no “button” or clickthrough link on the big screen that someone can take action on, even if an ad inspired them to do so. Viewers might take out their phones and visit a website or download an app, but household viewing complicates individual attribution and makes it harder to correlate down-funnel actions with ad exposure.

But again, household measurement offers a solution. Connecting household viewership to individual device-level actions to assess return on ad spend requires blending IP addresses and device IDs around a certain lookback window. For instance, if a brand has a pixel on their website, marketers can gather information about that web traffic and then use their device graphs to determine if the web visitor is from a household that received the ad.

Interoperability is essential for TV’s future

The household is an important metric for TV advertisers, and players in the industry must take action to ensure its longevity. The interoperability of device and identity graphs will be paramount for advertisers to understand households holistically and track performance across channels and devices.

And building interoperability across currencies will empower advertisers to match identifiers with these various standards to get more insights out of household data. As a result, the ad-tech ecosystem will be more open, empowering advertisers with greater flexibility and options in executing their campaigns.

While it has its challenges, the household isn’t going anywhere as a TV measurement metric. For one, the household is entrenched in how we consume content as a society, and it will remain crucial for group buying decisions. But more importantly, the household will be a critical lever for TV ad measurement and targeting in a fragmented era of multiple currencies, devices and channels. The household isn’t passé. For those prepared to evolve, it’s the future.