Cross-Screen Metrics Don’t Have to Be ‘Perfect’ to Be Effective: Wavemaker’s Rinaldi

Whether viewers watch traditional linear TV or have shifted to streaming services, they’re still spending a significant amount of time with the biggest screen in their households.

The change in consumption habits has spurred a need for measurement methods to capture demographic-based or audience-based buying.

“The screen itself hasn’t lost consumption.

The TV screen has been consumed more than ever before.

Where we see a shift is how we buy it,” Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at GroupM’s Wavemaker, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

“For us as an industry to get a lot better, we’ve got to create the mechanisms that allow us to plan appropriately in both scenarios.” Extending media reach while limiting wasteful spending is still the goal, and marketers have ways to measure CTV viewability with internet addresses and automatic content recognition (ACR) data on smart TVs.

Still, there remains a need to link impressions with outcomes.

“We also have to think about: what did that incremental reach do for my business?

If I did reach new people, great.

Did they grow the base from sales?” Rinaldi said.

“Those two things have not come together yet, so we have to separate church and state for now.” Amid these rapid changes in viewing habits, measurement companies and data providers are developing solutions to track consumer exposure to advertising.

Rinaldi said there still will be challenges in bringing together viewing data from different sources.

“I don’t think we’re going to see ‘perfect’ in the next couple years.

That’s one of the flaws we have as a marketplace right now.

We’re waiting for that perfect scenario to be measured in every single screen that we touch,” he said.

Brands need to consider the needs of their campaigns, and what they hope to learn from their measurement methods, Rinaldi said.

“When we take that approach, we won’t create perfection, but we’ll at least create this learning agenda and test-and-learn scenario,” he said.

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.

This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen.

For more videos on this topic, visit this page.

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.