Origin, the cross-media measurement initiative developed by UK advertiser trade group ISBA, is launching Beta trials with 35 of its members, ISBA announced today. Using Origin, these brands will be able to measure their campaigns’ deduplicated reach and frequency across YouTube, Meta, and linear TV.
An initial tranche of ten brands have already started the onboarding process, with the remaining 25 due to start in the coming months. The first ten brands involved in Beta tests are Confused.com, HSBC, L’Oréal, NatWest, PepsiCo, P&G, Red Bull, Tesco, Unilever and Virgin Media O2.
The start of Beta trials is a significant milestone for Origin, which has been in development since 2019. The platform has already undergone Alpha testing with five advertisers, but this used synthetic campaign data. Beta trials will use real campaign data, marking the first time Origin will be properly put through its paces during a live campaign. Origin says that the ability to surface non-proprietary and independently audited cross-media campaign audience data from a single-source will represent a media-first globally.
“The Beta Trials mark a pivotal moment for the Origin programme – when Origin theory turns into practice and we start to surface real, accountable and actionable data from the platform,” said Tom George, Origin’s CEO. “The calibre and scale of the advertisers
involved in this phase speaks for itself and underlines the demand from the market for the programme.”
Advertisers happy, broadcasters less so
For advertisers invested in the project, Origin has been a long time coming.
One of the first steps Origin took in its early days was to consult advertisers on their north star for cross media measurement. The resulting wish list was long, but the common starting ground was the need for deduplicated reach and frequency measurement across media channels.
Providing this sort of measurement is very technically complex, as it involves fusing vastly different types of data sets. A lot of work over the past five years has been put into creating and validating a methodology to do this. The project hasn’t been helped by a lack of enthusiasm from broadcasters and Barb, the UK’s measurement JIC. Origin has had to work around this, assigning Kantar to build an alternative panel to cover linear TV viewing.
The tool which advertisers will have access to in Beta testing won’t quite be representative of the full Origin product. Aside from any updates made based on Beta trial feedback, the full Origin product will fold in data from a wider range of media channels beyond linear TV, YouTube, and Meta.
However, given the amount of ad spend concentrated within those three channels, the Beta tool will cover a significant proportion of advertisers’ investment. And given the amount of time brands have spent asking for deduplicated reach and frequency measurement tools, they’ll be happy for any data they can get their hands on.
“For Confused.com, this platform has the potential to improve the efficiency of our media campaigns in allowing us to accurately measure deduplicated reach of different channels,” said Gareth George, head of media at Confused.com. “And once this is rolled out more widely with other key media suppliers on board we could be looking at a much more efficient industry altogether.”
Following the Beta trials, Origin will transition to a short pilot trials stage, with a full launch anticipated for early 2025.
