InteracTiVoty: The Real Problem with Set-Top-Box Data: If You Had It, What Would You Do With It? - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBloggers

In case any of you have been hibernating for the past year or so many of your friends in media research are becoming increasingly involved in a frenzy of interest hope and speculation about settopbox data As a guy who makes his living selling research derived from settopbox data that makes me happyMost of the current energy seems to be focused on technical measurement and editingcrediting processes and comparing across data suppliers and research vendors Extremely important stuff no argument from me I have the privilege of a frontrow seat at TiVo the only company I know of that is a settopbox hardware manufacturer software developer and research provider To my knowledge TiVo stb39s are the only ones in which data collection was prioritized and engineered into the original design And we control all aspects of the product along the way And it39s still been a lot of work over the years to get it right Other stb39s were generally not designed to be audience meters and bolting that capability on as an afterthought is an incredibly arduous exercise requiring the coordination of many disparate stakeholders all with different priorities I could write a 3page blog on 39things to watch out for in settopbox data39 in fact maybe I will So yes understanding the differences in the data especially the veracity of the source data is extremely important quotGarbage In Garbage Outquot is definitely in playBut imagine for a minute what would happen if all of that were solved and the industry was presented tomorrow with a wealth of reliable representative secondbysecond settopbox data I39m not sure anybody would know what to do with it By the way same situation applies I believe to addressable TV advertising Which is expected since very little reliable settopbox data exists today not much thinking has been done But it is often frustrating since the first instinct of most anyone exposed to our TiVo data is to apply it to the same tired frameworks that have existed for 40 years quotWe have one existing source counting up viewers now we have a new one let39s comparequot Nothing wrong with that but often that39s as far as it gets and that39s a travestyamp8230 but also an opportunity for the great minds of our industry to build a whole new level of understanding around marketing communicationsFor example think about reach and frequency for TV advertising Nothing has really changed in those metrics and how they are input into marketing plan and media mix models for decades But in a world where you can measure commercial audiences secondbysecond amp8211 what constitutes a commercial impression Does a viewer need to watch all thirty seconds of a 30 Fifteen seconds Three seconds The consumer behavior hasn39t changed people always watched parts of commercials but we never could measure it In fact commercial impressions for the most part are still counted using program audiences or more recently average quotC3quot audiences not specific commercial ratings or fractional commercial ratings And I can tell you first hand that audiences for a specific commercial can vary 3x up and down from the average commercial audience within a program episode Just think of all that noiseerror built into all these models Do the differences quotwash outquot across billions of grp39s Maybe to some degree But for any specific brand not so muchNow take it a step further What is the difference in the value of an impression for a viewer who saw thirty seconds versus ten A viewer with quotopportunitytoseequot in Live mode versus a viewer who chooses to not fastforward a spot in Timeshifted mode Ten seconds of impression at the beginning of the spot versus ten seconds of impression at the end of a spot For an auto manufacturer the value of an impression in a household that has indicated they intend to purchase a new car in the next 12 months versus a household who hasn39t For a movie studio the value of an impression in a household who goes to the movies on average twice a month versus a household who goes twice a yearNow take it a step further What does aggregate fastforwarding behavior tell us about the resonance or quotengagementquot of a commercial audience among the program audience If you take the same spot and in one program it is fastforwarded by 40 of the Timeshifted audience and in another program it is fastforwarded by 80 of the Timeshifted audience which audience is receiving the message better and what impact does that have on effectivenessAnd now let39s take it even further beyond just television viewing Settopbox data finally gives us the ability to see singlesource crossmedia consumption with enough scale to provide meaningful measures TiVo and Quantcast have an offering available today using 35000 optedin households So we can take all of the insight discussed above from the television side and add Internet consumption and begin to understand the impact of exposure to different marketing messages with different frequencies and different recencies on different media platformsIn the next ten years some person or people is going to rewrite most of what we know about marketing science and it39s going to be on the basis of settopbox data These people will have awards named after them sell millions of books and probably have a helluva lot of fun Do we need to crawl before we can walk and get all the technical basics of stb data worked out Absolutely But hopefully some ambitious souls will also start now with the great data that39s already available to start building the foundation of the next generation of marketing researchTodd Juenger is VP and General Manager Audience Research and Measurement for TiVo IncRead all Toddamp8217s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at InteracTiVoty MediaBizBloggersFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBlogger

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InteracTiVoty: The Real Problem with Set-Top-Box Data: If You Had It, What Would You Do With It? - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBloggers

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InteracTiVoty: The Real Problem with Set-Top-Box Data: If You Had It, What Would You Do With It? - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBloggers

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