10 / 60
Page 10
ensure that every person who watches their con-
tent – and the advertising around it – is captured,
and there is therefore pressure from all sides for
TAM providers to adapt their services quickly. This
presents two challenges for TAM providers: firstly,
they must develop and rigorously test solutions
that are increasingly complex from a technologi-
cal and methodological perspective; and secondly,
they require the consensus of many different ac-
tors – sometimes with contrasting opinions – be-
fore they can adopt a particular route, and in many
cases they rely on broadcasters and publishers to
take some form of action, such as the deployment
of measurement tags in their content, before they
can start reporting data to the market.
Above all, TAM operators need to ensure they
retain the trust of all interested parties. Whereas
digital has arguably been able to adopt a more
ad
hoc
approach to measurement, with incremental
improvements over time, the television industry
stands to suffer potentially irreversible damage
if any next generation TAM systems are flawed
when launched.
One approach to this has been the deployment of
video audience reporting in stages, as seen for ex-
ample in France and Sweden. BARB in the UK has
chosen to release its first
TV Player Report
(Sep-
tember 2015) in beta form, using data from only
a selection of the country’s broadcasters at first.
This allows development of the newmeasurement
system in the UK to progress faster than would be
the case if BARB waited for all broadcasters to be
fully ready with the technical deployments they
need to enact.
/ / Television audience
measurement as a quality
benchmark for future systems
To ensure the next generation of audiovisual au-
dience measurement meets the needs of both
advertisers and broadcasters – and by extension
gies and technologies deployed. Measurement has
moved from paper diaries, with results reported
after weeks’ or months’ of delay, to electronic
measurement by people meters, which can de-
liver overnight results for television viewing. The
technology of audio matching has in recent years
been supplemented (in some cases replaced) with
watermarking. As personal recording devices, first
analogue and later digital, have increased in pene-
tration, markets have adopted techniques to allow
both live and time-shifted viewing to be included
within television ratings.
The most recent shift in viewing, which is dis-
cussed in Part 2 of this report, has seen view-
ers use an increasingly diverse and sophisticated
range of Internet-enabled devices to access tele-
vision content in new ways, presenting TAM with
its latest – and perhaps most difficult – challenge.
Whilst the panel-based and census-level data col-
lection techniques developed for Internet Audience
Measurement (IAM) are now being deployed to
capture these new
video
viewing behaviours, until
recently it has not been possible to combine these
technologies with traditional TAM to provide holis-
tic audience figures.
It is arguably harder for TAM providers to respond
to these changes than it is for viewers to adapt
and evolve their consumption behaviours. Inevi-
tably, media agencies and their advertiser clients
require the most accurate, comprehensive and
granular data possible, and broadcasters want to
“To ensure the next
generation of audiovisual
audience measurement meets
the needs of both advertisers
and broadcasters, egta
believes in a viewer-centric
approach.”