Where Are We Now: Real Time TV Ad Metrics

“Hey Siri, what’s the value of an Apple spot featuring Cookie Monster in prime time on a Tuesday?”The TV advertising business has long been a less than transparent industry, for hidden behind the smoke of a martini lunch and the  reflective mirrors of the Upfront gloss, deals are made, programs are measured by panels and values are estimated as such. People love to complain about the measurement part, but only recently has there been any change in how TV is being measured.   To understand that change, it helps to go back a few years to a Seattle suburb where Sean Muller, CEO of iSpot,  was watching television with his wife.Sean knew very little about television.  A former CTO in the digital space, he knew about digital content- the way it was organized, measured and monetized. But TV, content he just assumed steeped in some logic. “I believed every piece of content already existed on the web. I was watching my wife’s shows and wasn’t really interested in the content, but was very interested in the ads. And as I sat there watching the ads, I kept googling them because some of them were funny and interesting. And I wanted to know more – who’s making them, how much is being spent on them, why are they running where they are. I was just hungry for data.” And he wasn’t able to find any of it. There were some ads on YouTube, but YouTube didn’t know what’s airing right now. So he went and made his own repository.“The theory was to build the destination for everyone to use while they were on their smart devices and watching TV.” They built something more than just a clip repository: they built something with a tech stack that had the ability to record ads, archive them, and tag relevant information and listen to said information for activity across search engines and social networks – everything from the agency to the product to the actors. And within two months of launch, they had 1 million monthly visitors. “Our theory was right,” Muller joked, “turns out not everything was available online”.From there, they realized they were getting requests from brands and networks that realized they were tracking the ads in real-time. Muller, coming from the digital world, was used to everything being tracked in real-time; that TV ads, that commanded such a high cost and value, weren’t being was a shock to him. “We didn’t believe it at first. We just assumed everyone did it this way and it wasn’t that big of a deal. We laughed when we heard there were 3 to 6 week delays, we thought they were playing a joke on us.” Not only had iSpot accomplished what the industry never had before: real time media scheduled for advertising, it had data on digital response which it turns out amounts to more than a billion per month. That’s a billion responses to TV ads, no one in the $70B ad market had been able to harness before.Once adoption occurred, they realized they needed to work on building out what the audiences for these ads looked like. So they built a means of measuring impressions, once again in real-time. To do so, they had to ignore traditional TV metrics and express how ads were being displayed in a format more akin to digital. For Muller, he “think[s] of television as a device, and one that isn’t going away.” So they partnered with the manufacturers and they’re embedded at the TV level. With an audience of 11 million devices across all American zip codes, with all cable and satellite providers covered, “if we see them, we measure them.”Muller’s goal isn’t to replace the Nielsen GRP – “that’s there, people are buying off of it, like it or not.” What he is bringing to the table, and where he sees the industry moving, is actual transparency and performance metrics for advertisers delivered in time and with such detail that advertisers can act on the data-- be it theirs own or that of a competitor.From view rate measurement that allows advertisers to see what ads are being viewed, against what day parts, programs, and networks; to digital response where brands can identify the moments that actually generate some action. They can see retention, spend patterns, creative variations, industry trends and all the variability in audience to see what’s actually been delivered and consumed.And it doesn’t look bad either:Networks can understand the promotional ad load of competitive networks and watch the migration and ad spend choices of their customers. Agencies can see when fatigue sets in for creatives. Brands can see infinitely more than they have ever before. And finally, and potentially most importantly, there’s a unified measurement across linear, OTT, and VOD. With this, advertisers can actually see the full-scale delivery of a unit. And from here, they can finally see how much that Cookie Monster ad is actually worth and who as a result is googling for cookies or whatever that ad was for.So where does this leave things for the future? Muller sees a trend where ad buyers and sellers are looking to optimize and automate their creative planning.  With the ability to see how their TV advertising is doing in real-time along with their digital, they’ll be able to plan everything at once with the kind of responsiveness advertisers are getting online.  Networks, who are already starting to do more programmatic, are looking to do more than their traditional demographic buys as they augment everything with more data. And Muller feels iSpot.tv is already there, waiting for the networks to catch up with it. He sees it as a case where, instead of asking where are we now, the ecosystem needs to ask where are we going. And from there, they’ll see that there’s already an answer. And they won’t even have to ask Siri.