The Quest For Common Measurement: Amobee’s Schleider

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Now that marketers can, finally, accurately measure their TV advertising, you would think they may be happy.

But the explosion in new measurement techniques and providers is actually causing a headache for ad buyers who want an apples-to-apples analysis of their ad effectiveness.

No wonder so many are actually now calling for fewer, more reliable ways of measuring that smoothe out discrepancies.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Aleck Schleider, SVP of client and data strategy at ad-tech firm Amobee, says advanced TV measurement has been spurred on by Vizio's smart TV ad unit Inscape making its automatic content recognition (ACR) data widely available to vendors.

"The ability to measure TV ... has become a lot easier," Schleider says.

"That allows for companies to do to some pretty seamless marketing measurement." But that isn't all good news.

"The fact is, there's so much data, there's so much fragmentation, that it just kind of creates a lot of confusion in the marketplace," he adds.

"Ideally there's going to be some level of reset ... it does require some truth-level data.

"There has to be commonality.

We've got to pick these pieces off the floor of all this fragmented components, bring them together, put it together to have a common measurement.

"Brands don't want to have to work with different broadcasters in their own measurement solutions." In December, Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.

4Screen works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing.

It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.

Schleider thinks the likes of Nielsen will be leaned on to boost ACR measurement with techniques like panels, plus its own ACR sources, to improve accuracy.

The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.

This video is part of  Beet.TV's coverage  of  RampUp, LiveRamp's summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.

This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.