Look Beyond Audience Size: Rethinking What Makes TV Inventory Valuable

As an industry, we decided a long time ago to focus most of our attention on counting, measuring audience size. I have to give credit to fellow industry veteran Kelly Abacarian. As part of her NBCU Measurement Independence Initiative in 2021 and 2022, she tried to get the industry focused on this issue, reminding us that the majority of research budgets are spent on counting audiences. Not focused on measuring the impact of advertising. Not focused on measuring other attributes that might align with advertising that has a better ROI/ROAS for the media company’s advertising partners.

Have we made any progress in the last few years? Have we heeded Kelly’s sage advice? Disappointedly, I’d say no. There is lots of productive dialogue about linear TV and cross-platform measurement, as the industry navigates through its multi-currency stage and the growing importance of measuring the challenged streaming world. But still the focus is mostly on counting, with some amount of focus on counting cross-screen and measuring unduplicated reach and frequency.

This problem with only focusing on counting gets more severe when you think how ratings have regressed and converged over the last 10 years. Rating size used to be a differentiator of inventory value, but that is no longer the case. Agencies used to be able to apply some ratings minimum to what they bought- i.e. only buy programs that have a 0.5 demo rating or larger. I analyzed Nielsen's total day ratings for all cable networks that Nielsen measures for the current broadcast year for the A18-49 demographic. What I found was scary:

• Only 2 networks, Fox News and ESPN, deliver over 100K. Those networks make up only 18% of cable inventory;
• There are 93 networks that Nielsen measures that deliver less than 50K. Those networks make up 57% of cable inventory

So when an agency deploys a rating minimum, they are dramatically reducing supply and limiting their buying options.

While the industry doesn’t have comparable data for AVOD and FAST channels, I suspect those platforms have a similarly large long tail in terms of audience size.

What should the industry do when we have this glut of programming that isn’t differentiated by audience size alone? We then have to seriously consider leveraging other attributes to guide buying decisions, leveraging those that contribute to media effectiveness. And the good news is that we have lots of different options to choose from.

Context signals are obviously important if they can be scaled. Leveraging viewership behavioral data that contributes to audience size is another approach. Remember that the rating calculation is really just how many people watched - the cume - and how often/how long they watched. A show with more loyal viewers - longer durations, higher frequency - should be valued differently than a show with less loyal viewers. Inventory quality signals, as measured by providers like Adelaide, are another option. Tvision’s eyes-on-screen attention data have been available in the market for quite some time.

A new emerging player to consider is Mediaprobe, which measures Emotional Impact via galvanic skin response (GSR). From the research they’ve done, they’ve found a broad spectrum of Emotional Impact for both content and the ads in that content.

The image above shows the overall (averaged across the entire session) Emotional Impact Score (EIS) for all sessions (a session = a telecast). The distribution is close to normal, with the bulk of overall EIS ranging from 490 to 718, with very few sessions scoring less than 375 (a very low overall EIS) or over 775 (a very high overall EIS).

We’re long overdue to leverage new metrics to value TV and CTV inventory. As an industry, we need to get more aggressive with testing these variables in a precise fashion, testing various combinations because there probably won’t be one additional variable to rule them all. Then we move on to the fun stage of implementation, and seeing the ROI from our video buys improve.

This article was written by Howard Shimmel. Howard's a trusted industry leader with deep expertise in technology adoption, research methodology, and advertising’s impact on sales. Currently, he serves as Head of Strategy at datafuelX and President of Janus Strategy and Insights, a research consultancy. Shimmel held multiple leadership positions in the industry, including Chief Research Officer at Turner Broadcasting, Senior Vice President at Turner and Nielsen, and roles at America Online, WBIS, Symmetric Resources, and MTV Networks.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

Click the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friends.
The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.