Or Divider (Depending Who You Ask)
That’s a wrap on Cannes 2022. It was a whirlwind of a week celebrating excellence in creativity and the infrastructure that enables it to flourish.
As measurement specialists, we were pleased to see the topic at the forefront of industry conversation. After all, no matter how brilliant a piece of content might be, if it isn’t delivered to the right person at the right time, its value is wasted.
Here’s what we learned:
The debate rages on
While everyone agreed that measurement plays an integral role in the delivery of media, opinions on approaches and solutions to how that measurement translates to trading currencies differed across the board.
Decision makers used to have access to the information necessary to transact with confidence, but the data that informed those decisions has disappeared over time, leaving a foundation of inaccurate and incomplete data. The industry continues to rally for new solutions that reflect evolving consumer behavior.
But out of breakdown comes breakthroughs. One of many debates on the future of measurement took place at the OpenAP villa, where it became increasingly clear that the industry is eager to add granularity to existing practices so that the targeting, activation, and measurement of advertising can be more precise. The panel of experts, including our very own Joanna Drews, agreed that the way to facilitate this is through the integration of better data.
Measurement is a team sport
One thing everyone could agree on was that the future will not be measured by a single currency.
As Kelly Abcarian of NBCUniversal said on stage during her panel alongside other measurement leaders at Female Quotient’s Equality Lounge, “Measurement is a team sport.”
The stakes have never been higher as the marketplace demands more from measurement providers. The marketplace doesn’t want a monopolistic black box, but it can’t support disparate siloed systems either.. Hypha has the unique ability to bridge this gap. Our data serves as the matchkey to facilitate interoperability between disparate datasets, breaking down silos to create a unified picture of an individual’s entire media experience.
The future is here
Our industry is shifting. Moving out of a monopolistic ecosystem into an open marketplace brings great opportunity. In the past year, we have seen the industry move from a single point of failure, to the emergence and incorporation of alternative currencies.
The future is here, with major networks incorporating multiple different currencies into their trading strategies. These currencies are no longer ‘alternative’, but rather accepted components of a greater whole. We heard them referred to as ‘new currencies’ or ‘advanced currencies’ creating a ‘multi-currency’ world. Whatever the label, Hypha is here to fuel them all.
The blueprint for success
With so many different measurement options, the industry is turning to experts at The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), working in tandem with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the United States, to spearhead a framework for cross-media measurement. Working with some of the world’s biggest marketers, tech firms, broadcasters, and agency holding groups, this initiative has mapped out what the future of media measurement standards should look like.
The objective of the framework is to expedite the implementation of a new wave of cross-media measurement solutions. In order to do so, delivering individual impressions across platforms is key. This can only be achieved through the combination of panel data with big data. While big data helps us achieve scale, panel data is necessary to provide the granularity and calibration required to reflect true consumer behavior.
Hypha’s omnichannel cross-device panel provides the Unified Individual Media Metrics – the media metrics representing the entirety of the media experience down to the individual – that can be combined with a wide array of device delivery data sets to achieve the holistic view of consumption that the industry is asking for.
Interoperability or bust
Precise measurement is the fuel for the advertising ecosystem. Without it, marketers can’t acquire new customers, publishers don’t understand which content their audience likes best, and consumers are left with content and advertising that is irrelevant, incessant, and incomplete.
The multi-currency future we are living in can only work if different measurement providers work together interoperably to reflect the true consumer experience. This requires connection, communication, and collaboration across the board. As new trading currencies emerge to meet industry demands, it becomes increasingly clear that their success is contingent on the integration of data inputs at the individual consumer level in an omnichannel and cross-device manner.
HyphaMetrics’ ability to provide a Unified Individual Media Metric (UIMM) provides impressions in an omnichannel cross-platform fashion and fuels these advanced currencies to power their application across the media ecosystem. Because Hypha serves as a matchkey, or source of truth that calibrates and connects other large datasets to demonstrate the entire contextualized media experience down to the individual, our data is the linchpin to the industry’s interoperable future. This will enable interconnection across the media ecosystem among brands, agencies, video platforms, media owners and content providers, gaming, data and audience aggregators, streaming platforms and services, and pay TV distributors.
Integration of this data allows each branch of the ecosystem to not only solve their individual business problems but also transact more efficiently across the entire media landscape with access to competitive intelligence down to the individual, restoring accuracy across key industry functions such as planning, targeting, optimization, and analytics.