Musings on the Media Rating Council
Do you remember the episode of I Love Lucy, where Bob Hope was the guest star? It seems that Lucy really, REALLY wanted Ricky to put her in the show, but he was, as per usual, disinclined to do so. Fortuitously, she had Bob Hope in her corner.. The resulting number was “Nobody Loves the Ump.”
Nobody loves the ump. I think about that song sometimes when the topic of the Media Rating Council (MRC) comes up. Writing standards and overseeing audits and accreditations must sometimes feel like a thankless task. But there are a lot of tangible benefits the MRC brings to the table, including the two biggies— transparency and trust. Without trust, it is difficult for an industry to align around a given data set as the basis for, literally, billions of dollars in transactions.
I joined Comscore as Chief Research Officer in 2007, after an 8-month stretch consulting for them on their new MRC engagement. For 13 years I oversaw the Comscore audit function; eventually that team grew to 7 people, helmed by the earnest and steadfast Larry Goldstein. And sure, the MRC was the ump, but oddly enough, I LIKE this ump. It isn’t a perfect institution, they don’t oversee perfect processes, but on balance they are a force for good in the space I now call “advertising analytics.”
And there’s another non-trivial point. This text comes directly from the MRC site:
“After investigation and extensive testimony the (congressional) Committee determined that Industry self-regulation, including independent audits of rating services was preferable to government intervention. The Harris Committee hearings resulted in the formation of an Industry-funded organization to review and accredit audience rating services called the Broadcast Rating Council (now referred to as the MRC).” (emphasis added)
Preferable to government intervention. I think I speak for everyone who has ever worked in audience measurement in the US when I say, thank you MRC for keeping congress out of our knickers.
Astute readers will likely suspect that just about now, there’s a “but” coming.
At the risk of giving Beavis and Butthead something to snicker at… here’s my “but.”
Right now, all 48 Nielsen Audio PPM markets are either accredited or in the process. None of the diary markets are; the diary markets— around 200 of them— are on haitus. My estimate is that something like 65%-70% of the population is accounted for in those 48 markets, so that’s probably 70% or so of the Nielsen Audio revenues (local revenues; they have national radio measurement as well.)
Nielsen recently removed Nielsen One from the process pending roadmapped enhancements (NTI, NHI, NSS, and N-Power all remain accredited; NTI out-of-home is in process.).
VideoAmp recently exited the process, but will re-assess in 2027.
iSpot is accredited for their commercial occurrence data. No other commercial occurrence provider is accredited or in process.
Among attention measurement providers, Adelaide is in the process, having completed the pre-audit. XPLN, a French company in the attention space, has recently entered the process. None others are listed on the MRC website. (Note: I am an Advisor to Adelaide.) EDIT: Brian Ejsmont, who worked on the DoubleVerify MRC audit, informs me that their accreditation includes an Attention metric. Sorry, DV. My bad.
No services measuring “lift” or “incrementality” are in process.
The whole industry is aflutter over outcomes. The MRC has published Outcomes Measurement Standards (Ron Pinelligave a fine presentation on these yesterday; reach out to MRC directly for the deck). There is a push toward outcomes replacing ratings as advertising’s transactional currency.
There are no outcome measurement providers accredited or in process.
Buyers and sellers of advertising, who rely on all these kinds of services, collectively, as an essential pillar of commerce, would naturally like to see more services accredited. When services resist submitting to an audit, it naturally raises the question: “what have they got to hide?”
This is the wrong question. They almost certainly have nothing to hide.
Rather, many of these services are forced to make the most responsible economic decision. Completing the MRC process isn’t cheap, And it becomes difficult to justify the cost when it represents too large a share of the service’s revenues.
When I was at Comscore, my MRC auditing budget was well into seven figures. In addition, we had a dedicated team which at its largest, as I say, was 7 people. As Bugs Bunny would say, “that’s a lotta cabbage.” Many measurement services, especially nascent ones, simply can’t justify the spend. And that’s a shame, because more throughput would be better for everyone.
Consider Nielsen Audio for example; not to pick on them, but this is illustrative. The PPM markets, all accredited or in process, probably account for easily 70% of their radio revenues. The other 200-ish diary markets are on hiatus. But honestly. Given the fact that most of the spend in those 200 hiatus markets is local direct (the fast food franchisee, the bottler, the car dealer), and that the diary audit might cost as much as the PPM audit, a decision to forego accreditation in those markets may be entirely justifiable. An investment against 30% of revenue is a different call than an investment against 70%.
I’ve talked to several smaller companies who offer different types of advertising and media measurement— lift, attention, outcomes and so on. It is not uncommon for these companies to wrestle with how to justify the labor and audit costs of accreditation, given the size of their business. Here are some entirely made-up numbers, so don’t try to figure out who I’m talking about (it’s no one), but you can see where it would be tough for a company, barely profitable on $3 million in revenues, to find $300K for an audit. And by the way, that’s an annual budget line, not a one time thing.
So what are we to do? I think there is a case to be made for rethinking the MRC audit process, with the goal of figuring out a way to bring more companies into the process. I think we need to recognize that cost is a non-trivial factor. Maybe it is possible to create tiers, such that companies can participate at an “entry level,” and grow to full accreditation as their business grows.
I’d ask what you think, but I haven’t figured out how to offer a comments section yet.
Fox & Roku Just Won the Video Brand Loyalty Wars (Before We Even Knew This Was a Thing)
The response to the Fox acquisition of Roku seems to be universally positive-- great move for Fox. I'm certainly not here to rain on that parade; I share the sentiment. First off, because the firmament of video advertising is obviously shifting, and a "core four" broadcast network owner like Fox needs to be structured to compete with the Skydance/Paramount/Time/Warner/Turner/CBS/Viacom/Discovery's of the world.
But when I saw the deal announced, I was reminded of one of my fundamental laws of marketing (someday I'll write an article about my 10 laws of marketing, as soon as I can get to 10). To wit: Brand Loyalty Tends to Live at the Point of Customer Interface.
Suppose your preferred toothpaste is Crest, but you buy toiletries in bulk at CostCo, and the only toothpaste they carry at CostCo is Colgate. You're going to buy Colgate. Brand loyalty lives at the point of customer interface, and the point of customer interface is the retailer.
Suppose you are a dedicated Android user. You might switch from a Samsung to a Motorola to a Google to an Xiaomi phone-- as long as it runs Android. Brand loyalty lives at the point of customer interface, and the point of customer interface is the OS.
Now think about streaming services. The popular platforms all deal with churn. It is not uncommon for consumers to subscribe into a platform, watch the shows they want to see, and then unsubscribe out. But if you use Roku (we have a Roku for every set in each of two homes), you're not going to switch platforms. If Roku stops offering, say, Paramount+, you may well stop watching Paramount+. Brand loyalty lives at the point of customer interface, and the point of customer interface is the Streaming OS. Not the streaming platform; those churn like butter. It's the OS through which you pick your platform that commands brand loyalty.
Linear TV is dying. We know this. We now watch TV via streaming. Streaming platforms do not engender brand loyalty. Has anyone ever said, "If it's not on Hulu, I'm not watching it!"? But the OS (including the remote) does. Fox just cornered the market on brand loyalty among the major TV publishers.
Now at this point, one might be tempted to note that smart TV penetration is so high that eventually the Roku, Chromecast, and Firestick market will collapse. But Roku absolutely understands that they are in the OS business, not the hardware business.
Get this. Over a third of smart TVs in the US run on the Roku OS. Not the sticks. The Smart TVs.
Over a third.
Roku is the Apple of TV. (I know, you'd think Apple would be. They're not.) In addition to their OS share of Smart TVs, Roku accounts for half of all OTT devices in the US (Comscore; see link below).
In addition to the raw power of Fox properties in that unique space of linear-TV-that-is-must-watch-live (already a space they dominate), now they have a dominant position in the TV OS space.
It is worth noting that there is one thing that trumps brand loyalty: fandom. Indeed, one can think of fandom as hyper-brand loyalty. We've all seen books and articles on turning customers into fans. Well, if you're the NFL, or MLB, or NASCAR, or the World Cup, you already know this. Your customers already ARE fans.
All those properties are carried by Fox.
And Fox is very much aware of the value of fandom; just check out the LinkedIn posts from Fox SVP, Research & Data, Ad Sales (and personal bestie) Kym Frank. They know what they're doing.
With all the splashy M&A in the video/ad tech space recently, it is possible that people may have overlooked Fox, a brand name we've perhaps come to instinctively associate with the aging news viewer. But boy, is that wrong. They've just pulled ahead of the pack in brand loyalty in the video space, and that's a major deal.
On Nielsen, the MRC, the VAB, the Panel, and Big Data
I wanted to offer some commentary– call it an op-ed– on the recent MRC announcement regarding Nielsen, and the overall controversy about Nielsen data as they migrate from Panel-only to Panel+Big Data as currency of record.
First, some caveats and disclaimers. (1) From March 2020 through January 2024 I was Chief Measurability Officer at VideoAmp . As a result, I own VideoAmp stock options, which I continue to hope will be worth something. (2) For much of my career, I worked at companies competing with Nielsen, including Arbitron, Comscore and VideoAmp. (3) I have received, and taken to heart, feedback that my public commentary regarding Nielsen might betray some bias. That’s not something I want in the ol’ brand equity, so I’m working on it. (4) Manish Bhatia and I recently co-authored a paper for Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) on the economics of US national video currency (“Funding the Fiesta”). I heartily recommend it, and give it two thumbs up!
OK then.
If we read the trades and the White Papers, we know that there is much agita over the variation between Nielsen’s panel-only, versus panel-plus-big-data, audience estimates. Notably, the Video Advertising Bureau published a report highlighting what they characterized as Nielsen’s “instability” and “volatility”; Nielsen countered that the analysis was flawed.
But here’s the thing.
The primary finding in the VAB report was about how often, and by how much, the P+BD results differed from the panel-only data. That’s not volatility though; in statistics, “volatility” refers to variance over time, or “bounce”; not differences between two data sets. I’m reasonably certain that the introduction of the big data removed volatility, as in, made the data more trendable over time. The beef, then, is really that the introduction of big data introduces change versus the previous methodology.
But… SHOULDN’T IT? Aren’t we wasting a ridiculous amount of time and money to reinvent audience measurement if our collective expectation is that once we’re done, nothing changes?
One of the things I learned at Comscore and VideoAmp is that Big Data Doesn’t Lie. (I capitalized that because I’m trying to make it catch on.) 50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong; neither can 50 million devices worth of data. If you start with a panel-only approach, and then introduce data from tens of millions of devices, I think we can agree that, if you know what you’re doing, all that big data is going to help.
Remember back in 2021, when Nielsen lost MRC accreditation, and everyone said that this would herald the age of multi-currency? Well, I’m here to tell you, that was never the case. The opportunity was not in the accreditation loss; it was that in revamping their methodology, Nielsen was essentially becoming an “alternative currency” themselves. Ratings users would incur switching costs whether they changed vendors or not, putting the incumbent on more even footing with the challengers than ever before.
And I’m sure Nielsen knew this. So I believe that in incorporating big data, they deliberately did so in a “panel-first” way, using the big data to address zero cells and volatility, while relying on the panel (an expensive, differentiated asset) to have as much bearing as possible on reported data.
Based on what I’ve heard over the last 18 months, I suspect that all the issues Nielsen has faced with migrating from panel-only to P+BD, accrue from the tension between wanting to maintain trends, on the one hand, while wanting to reap the (seismic) benefits of big data on the other.
When I was at Comscore, every year when there was a somewhat discontinuous change in reported data (rolling in new universe estimates, new data partners, and methodology changes), we had to devote a ton of time and resources to helping clients navigate the impact, and it was painful for all. Painful, but necessary.
I grant that hindsight is 20/20. But in hindsight, I think Nielsen would have been better off if they’d bit the bullet and told clients, “P+BD will be different. It SHOULD be different. And this will suck. But it will only suck the one time, and once we’re on the other side, we can all move on.”
I think that incorporation of big data naturally tugged the results away from historical panel trends, and frankly, toward iSpot, VideoAmp, and Comscore results. It pretty much would have had to– remember those 50 million Elvis fans.
Based on what I’m hearing about new Nielsen methodological enhancements– e.g. changing the demographic model, adopting DASH for technology Universe Estimates (remind me some time to tell you how I made the DASH study a TV Universe study)-- I think they’re eventually going to end up in the right place (big data for signal and volumetric estimates; a panel to provide calibration and training on demography). This will make the Nielsen view of video consumption different from the one we grew up with, and more similar to the “alternative currencies.” But that is progress. Sometimes you have to disintermediate yourselves.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.mediapost.com/uploads/MRCrelease.pdf