What Is Media Monitoring And Why Should You Care About It?

Shea Kelly, CEO of media monitoring’s gold standard, CCR Media, our newest Thought Leaders Circle members, explains it all in this new video that looks at how media monitoring works and why it’s so important.

CCR's media monitoring service is the database leading measurement companies (pretty much all of them) use to match their ACR data. Think of it like Shazam - instead of a few notes, measurement vendors match a few pixels to a database to determine what shows and ads were being watched. CCR Media is the source of all those databases.

SHEA KELLY: So in distribution, you have over the air where the broadcaster is sending out their signal. Then we find a location that's close to there, and you put an antenna on the roof, you run a cable into a computer and then inside that computer is where our customers set up their software to either listen or to watch, depending on the use case.

What we actually provide our customers with is a service that allows them to think of us as an extension of their team.

We manage the process for them to monitor their signal. That means we actually make sure the signal is feeding into their software so they can monitor whatever it is that they're trying to monitor.

Then at the end of the month, we'll give them a report that, for example, says Hey, here is your uptime and when there was an event we took care of it and if something happened, let’s say there was an outage, we will report it out to them.

Over the past 25 years, distribution has gotten more complex—it's like the Wild West right now.

It was very controlled. You had over the air and then obviously cable, but now you have OTT and you have consumption on phones, and so the complexity of distribution continues to go up.

That makes it really hard to know, “is my channel getting served in all the different possible ways?”

So we're really seeing the challenge of managing all that complexity.

And what we've been trying to do is understand how do we keep simplifying that for our customers? How do we actually provide all that data at scale and bring them visibility?

What we've definitely learned is that it is important that we partner really closely with our customers to understand their challenges and be able to come up with a solution.

Because rIght now we're managing just under 7,000 channels in the US, covering the whole country.