A common frustration for advertisers and agencies when it comes to connected TV advertising is a lack of standardisation in measurement and transparency. There’s significant variation in the data which media owners and intermediaries pass back to the buy-side, and disagreement around how specific metrics are defined. Buyers frequently report that they don’t always know exactly where their spend is ending up.
Industry trade group IAB Europe is hoping to help tackle this issue, by creating a common set of measurement standards and transparency principles for CTV advertising. This framework, developed in collaboration with businesses including Amazon Ads, EGTA, Freewheel, Google, IAB UK, MFE ProSiebenSat.1, Pubitalia, RMB Belgium, RTÉ, Samsung Ads and YouTube, has today been released for public comment.
Pushing for consistency and clarity
On the measurement side, the document provides definitions and outlines for a range of media metrics and performance metrics which are deemed suitable for CTV.
Generally, these standards don’t declare exactly how a particular metric should be measured. Looking at reach, for example, the framework lays out what should be measured (in this case, the number of unique individuals exposed at least once to an ad across all channels and platforms), without specifying which ways of calculating reach are and aren’t valid. It does however provide guidance on extra transparency around these metrics which should be passed on to buyers. For reach, for example, sellers and intermediaries should state how reach was calculated, and declare whether a co-viewing filter was included.
These definitions in some cases draw on existing standards, such as those set by the Media Ratings Council. Viewability and invalid traffic filtration metrics both draw on MRC definitions, for example.
The idea is to foster consistency around what these metrics measure in CTV environments specifically, setting minimum standards where necessary and specifying any additional information which needs to be shared with buyers to help them interpret those figures, while also allowing flexibility in terms of how they’re calculated.
Alongside these definitions, the framework also sets out some extra transparency principles which IAB Europe says should be generally applied across CTV trading.
These include sticking with unified and standards-aligned definitions, like those provided in the framework, and full disclosure of any measurement limitations, making it clear where a particular metric or methodology has known blind spots. IAB Europe also says that sellers should provide support for client-initiated data collection, provide visibility into device power state (i.e, whether the TV set was on or off when an ad played) as default, and provide granularity across reporting. On this last point, the framework specifically mentions device type, content, and genre as key dimensions which should be reported.
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