The past year has brought media measurement to the forefront of industry conversation. Networks, watchdog groups, and agencies have all voiced concerns about the industry’s current struggles to understand viewership in a world where there are more options than ever before– a conversation that’s been a long time coming.
For decades, the media industry has relied on a single currency to determine the value of ad space on television. This single currency ensured that media was measured accurately and advertising was sold at fair market value. But in recent years, as consumer behavior has evolved and splintered across a wide array of different platforms, the number of data points that need to be collected to inform this currency has grown exponentially.
With this fracturing, the use of a single currency has ceased to reflect the vast and fragmented landscape of consumer viewing behavior. This lack of standard measurement across these disparate sources has created inconsistencies and blindspots in how to allocate media. 
“There really is no single methodology that can take everything into account across different media companies or even across the array of screens people have at their disposal,” writes Brian Steinberg. The result is a “hodgepodge of solutions that leave some advertisers scratching their heads or, in other cases, cobbling together deals with individual media outlets that are hard to compare with one another.”
New demands are emerging for media measurement providers as stakeholders across the industry are calling for solutions that accurately reflect the increasingly complex nature of consumer behavior. It’s no longer enough to just tell them how many people watched a show. They want to know how they watched, which devices they used, what other content they may like, which other devices they may have been using while they watched, and – perhaps most importantly – did they take an action after watching.
Did the consumer watch a show live through their set top box or streamed on Hulu through their Apple TV? Were they scrolling social media, or looking up a company who had a product placement they saw during the show? Did they buy anything during the commercial break? Are they strictly reality TV fans, or are they also playing FIFA on XBox?
There have never been so many data points to collect.
Moving forward, media measurement will have to reflect this changing landscape and meet the industry’s cumulative demands: consumer centricity, interoperability, and multi-platform compatibility.
With the $60 billion to $70 billion spent on TV ads in the U.S. every year at stake – in addition to the tens of billions of dollars spent on digital video and streaming ads, the industry has reached a crossroads. Networks, agencies, and brands alike are preparing to move beyond a single currency and instead embrace the highest quality data available to them to represent their specific needs.
HyphaMetrics is a future-proof data-as-a-service solution that meets the cumulative industry demands for media measurement. Our measurement approach, which merges next-generation technology with industry accepted research methodologies, is inherently consumer-centric, interoperable, and multi-platform.
We definitively measure the entirety of the modern media environment to determine the exact exposure of consumers to any content, advertising, branding, or product. This single-source, cross-platform data pipeline, consisting of Zero Party Data, serves as the connective tissue through which the media ecosystem can communicate, and provides the unified individual media metric needed for trading, optimization and analytics across the media ecosystem.
But not all Zero Party Data is created equal. Hypha’s Centric Origin Data represents the holistic individual media experience– all behavioral touchpoints in connection with one another. Other measurement approaches require the aggregation of multiple disparate data sources, each representing decontextualized individual exposure, in order to stitch together an inference of the holistic experience. Centric Origin Data, however, derives all of these individual behavioral inputs from a single-source. It is contextualized media exposure down to the individual person.
At HyphaMetrics, innovation is in our DNA. Our independent Zero Party Data pipeline can be combined with a wide array of different data sources to provide the individual level granularity that reflects the full spectrum of consumer behavior. Because we capture every single consumer touchpoint and the various layers associated with each (such as simultaneous device usage), our data can serve as a source of truth across the media ecosystem to bring media decision making into the future.
After years of frustration with gaps in media measurement and inertia-driven black boxes, the industry has spoken– it’s time to move beyond one single currency to a democratized data ecosystem fueled by independent, permissioned data. The future belongs to the innovators.
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