“TV viewing is a social, shared experience. Multiple people in the household can be watching TV together. That’s why co-viewing is such an important factor for TV measurement, regardless of whether the content is linear or streaming,” explains Charbel Makhoul, General Manager, Vice President of Product Management, Data Science and Analytics at VIZIO.

In this exclusive interview, he details why VIZIO is partnering with Nielsen’s DAR on co-viewing measurement. “CTV may be digitally delivered, but it needs to be measured like TV, not like mobile or PC/laptop video, where co-viewing is completely irrelevant.”

ALAN WOLK (AW): Why did VIZIO decide to partner with Nielsen in order to better understand co-viewing behavior?

CHARBEL MAKHOUL (CM): Nielsen is the incumbent in TV measurement and they have been the de facto linear currency for a long time. They have a lot of experience in this field and so they were a natural choice.  And they made it easy for us to work with them.

However, to be clear, we have no exclusive deal with Nielsen. We are neutral. We can collaborate with other measurement solutions if the market requires it.

That said, we have found Nielsen to be an excellent partner and we are very happy with the results of our collaboration.

AW: How exactly does DAR measure household viewing?

CM: Digital Ad Ratings for VIZIO leverages Inscape’s currency grade ACR viewing data as well as Nielsen’s panel assets to determine household constitution and who is in front of the TV screen (aka co-viewing factors).

The way that works is we pass our ACR data on to Nielsen, and their data scientists analyze it in order to help determine how many people are in each household and how many people are likely watching a particular program or ad. They do that by applying the learnings they have from their panels on a variety of factors: demographics, genre, time of day. That way they are able to determine the probability that certain people in each household are going to be in front of the television at any given point based on the Inscape viewing data.

AW: Did you see any notable differences in ratings once you began integrating DAR and seeing co-viewing data?

CM: Yes, we’ve seen some very sizable increases. There was a campaign that a popular quick serve restaurant recently ran on WatchFree+, VIZIO’s own streaming  service. And when we re-calculated the ratings using the co-viewing data from DAR, we saw a greater than 30% increase in the ratings. That is quite a significant lift and I’d say it’s fairly representative of the sort of lift brands will be seeing when we fully integrate DAR’s co-viewing stats into all of our campaigns.

AW: What Is a Tracked Ad and How Does It Differ From a Served Ad?

CM: A “tracked” ad is the measure of the number of persons who saw an ad. So if an ad reaches a household with two individuals, it is counted as two impressions. A “served ad” by contrast, refers to the number of TV devices the ad was served to, but does not take the number of individual persons in each household into consideration. So measuring tracked ads is much more accurate.

AW: How does having co-viewing data make it easier for brands to understand how their campaigns are doing across linear and streaming?

CM: When co-viewing is applied to Inscape’s linear viewing data and combined with DAR tracked impressions, advertisers benefit because they get to see deduplicated audience reach as well as the true incremental reach they get from CTV. That, in turn, helps them to better understand the impact of their advertising.

AW: What other benefits do brands get from understanding co-viewing numbers? What about programmers (networks and streaming services)?

CM: Counting co-viewing will simply make CTV numbers more accurate, realistic and complete, and more importantly, allow for an apples-to-apples comparison to linear, which then makes it easy to plan across both. Linear TV has always used person-level metrics to ensure they measure all of the viewers of a particular show, so brands will not see this as a new concept, but rather as a sign that CTV is finally catching up.

Counting co-viewing also has the positive effect of reducing advertising waste during the planning and targeting phases and ensuring relevant ads are being delivered to the right audiences. If you are only counting the number of TV sets an ad is being served to, you are likely to miss viewers in your target by either over or undercounting them, which will lead to inefficiency and waste.

This approach will also benefit publishers (programmers, networks and streaming services) as it allows them to optimize their inventory and reduce waste. So it’s really a win all around as both brands and publishers benefit from counting co-viewing.

To learn more about the Smart TV Ecosystem, download our latest Special Report, Proving The Point: Case Studies That Prove The Power Of The New Smart TV Ecosystem