[opendtv] MBPT Spotlight: Resurrecting the Power of Television Advertising—Via the Set-Top Box | Broadcasting & Cable

From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 08:30:18 -0400

Hey Bert

Remember that Business Week article I posted last week about the Rentrak State
of the VOD market report?

This commentary put that article into perspective.

Regards
Craig

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/mbpt-spotlight-resurrecting-power-television-advertising-set-top-box/130448
MBPT Spotlight: Resurrecting the Power of Television Advertising—Via the
Set-Top Box

The January deal where CBS Corporation agreed to use Rentrak
audience-measurement services sent a clear message that big data, a staple of
Internet measurement and programmatic exchanges, is now fast becoming—if it
hasn’t already—a standard for the television medium.

And it’s about time.

Our industry has understood for quite a while the intractable problem of using
small samples across hundreds of cable channels with increasingly fragmented
viewing.

Thanks to smart TVs and set-top box data, television is entering a new world of
audience measurement and accountability.

Not only have we been dealing with unstable program ratings that have huge
sampling errors, but there have been unintended, systematic biases, such as the
understatement of cable audiences documented by the “zero cell” phenomenon
experienced in local meter and diary markets.

The solution to the sample-size problem has been sitting right in front of us
for over ten years, but it has taken the resources and entrepreneurship of
Rentrak to make that solution a big-time reality.

I’m speaking, of course, about that ubiquitous set-top box (STB), which has the
ability to passively capture anonymous, continuous electronic streams of
television viewing exposure vs. channel tuning on even the smallest of niche
channels, cable networks and local markets.

While the STB is not a perfect measurement device (frankly, there is no such
thing in the social sciences), one of the biggest concerns—false-positive
tuning—has been successfully dealt with by employing sophisticated mathematical
algorithms. And you can take it on faith that CBS, with its bullpen of
sophisticated researchers led by chief research officer David Poltrack, would
have never entered into this deal had they had any serious doubts about the
veracity of Rentrak ratings.

Another long-standing issue with STB data has been the attribution of
demographics and household characteristics to STB tuning. Since Rentrak is not
entering the home to collect such data, and the cable industry—out of concern
for privacy—will not provide such information, companies such as Rentrak and my
former company, TRA, use sophisticated privacy compliant matching rules to
infer the required household demographics information.

There’s no question that CBS’ interest in Rentrak was not only for its
reliable, census-sized-based television ratings in all 210 DMAs, but also
Rentrak’s tremendous insights into the viewer/demographic equation.

Think about it for a moment. There is a level of behavioral measurement that
the Internet used to have sole bragging rights to. Not anymore: With Rentrak’s
12 million STB homes, the television research industry has come of age, and CBS
is sitting on a gold mine.

And luckily for Viamedia’s advertiser and multichannel video programming
distributor operator-partner base, so are we. When I took over as president and
CEO of Viamedia—the largest independent local TV advertising company—I saw a
tremendous opportunity to expand our traditional spot television business
through the deployment of new technology platforms fueled by innovative, smart
databases.

Today, we are using Rentrak’s massive database to sell traditional television
spots on behalf of our 50 MVPD partners in more than 70 DMAs across our unique
cable footprint of over 3 million households, as well as sharing numerous data
insights with our more than 10,000 advertiser partners to help them grow their
businesses.

Tomorrow, we will be deploying Rentrak data behind our placemedia programmatic
planning/buying exchange. Think about the possibilities of that for a moment.
Advertisers will have the opportunity to select from myriad demographic,
psychographic and consumer buying data, and then use the power of search engine
optimization and big data to construct highly refined schedules that will find
our clients’ most crucial—leverageable—target audience in whatever television
program that audience happens to be watching. In effect, advertisers will be
able to use the placemedia portal to buy impressions (a.k.a. audiences) like
the Internet as opposed to the antiquated model of buying simple ratings.

It is the dawn of a new age of data accountability and smarter media on TV, and
for once we are not referring to the Internet. We are talking about the
60-plus-year-old television medium that is about to be planned, bought and
verified at the national and local level like it never has been before.

Lieberman was named president and CEO of Viamedia , an independent video sales
organization that specializes in local, cross-platform TV ad services for MSOs,
in January. Prior to that, he cofounded and was CEO of TRA Inc., the media and
marketing measurement company now owned by TiVo.

[opendtv] MBPT Spotlight: Resurrecting the Power of Television Advertising—Via the Set-Top Box | Broadcasting & Cable

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