The Future of Audience Measurement – Recommendations Concluded

These were all inspired by my being interviewed by comScore's Josh Chasin at the ARF Audience Measurement Symposium 2017 in June. I have no relationship with comScore and make these recommendations to all the players who would be king in the land of TV Currency USA, including Nielsen.

• Unless you are a research company we don't recommend your vying for the title; third party measurement is inviolable.
• You will need big data and a high response rate panel, but you can't simply conform one to the other, your rules of evidence need to go deeper, such as the new Simmons Probability Calibration technique reported in Post 2. Innovations in methodology are called for and all of the good ideas have not yet been exhausted.
• All new methodologies must be strongly validated and the validations replicated by different parties.
• Old methodologies that used to work need to be revalidated for the current environment.
• Suppliers of big data deserve fair compensation, even if they are network or MVPD or other customers of the research company. OTT can be solved this way, and it ought to be collected at the server end not the client end as the constant updating of software on mobile devices is an unwarranted resource hog.
• Matches need to be deterministic rather than probabilistic except for information that is not naturally occurring e.g. attitudinal questions, etc.
• There can be a Truth Standard again. The old one, telephone coincidentals, no longer serves. It was a methodological validation of specific ratings for specific networks, stations, etc. The new Truth Standard is ROI. If a methodology allows a practitioner to realize a higher ROI, activation based on the data/analytic signals is pragmatic. This is a different kind of Truth Standard and perhaps the only one we will ever have. It will serve.

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