The BEE solution (which stands for Brand Exposure & Engagement) harnesses data from 2+ million Bouygues Telecom set-top boxes plus existing Realytics technology to provide deterministic single-source measurement of national linear TV, BVOD and addressable TV. The exposure data can then be linked to downstream online consumer activity, such as website visits, app downloads, SMS responses and calls to a call centre (including incremental activity).

Realytics provides a platform that helps buyers optimise their media plans by harnessing a previous understanding of how TV advertising impacted business outcomes, and this is also wrapped into the BEE solution. Thus, advertisers are given a better understanding of the frequency needed to generate web activity, the number of impressions needed to deliver X% of incremental reach, and also the consequences of over-exposure of a household to the same campaign.

Guillaume Belmas, CEO of Realytics, believes the French market provides an outstanding model for how to deploy addressable TV successfully, due to the exceptional pan-industry collaboration that enabled rapid take-off. As we reported previously, his company has just authored the second edition of its ‘Addressable TV in France’ white paper series, outlining progress and next steps.

One of those next steps is improved measurement and attribution, and with a large part of French TV consumption still found on the set-top boxes of service providers like Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom, operator partnerships carry significant weight. Discussing the market needs generally, Belmas says: “There are still improvements to be made on reporting addressable TV advertising.

“Everyone has been focused on making targeted TV a reality and signing deals, but in the last few months both the buyside and sell-side agreed that we now need more proof of the efficacy of campaigns.”

He observes that usage of smart TV sets and connected TV apps is low in France compared to the rest of Europe.  Catch-up TV and BVOD are overwhelmingly consumed via set-top boxes, and this means measurement efforts must include a core focus on the service provider set-top box.

“The first goal of BEE is to measure exposure and reach, because one of the buyside priorities is to understand how they avoid audience duplication as they spread their money across advertising on linear TV, catch-up and addressable. Then there are questions about the performance of the different ‘channels’: does my linear TV perform better than my addressable TV campaign, and what about the BVOD campaign?

“Our history is as a TV attribution company, so we can show if campaigns are driving web traffic or other outcomes. One of the big questions for brands has always been, ‘How many impressions do I need to trigger an activity like a website visit or app download?’ That is a crucial insight if you want to fix the ideal frequency for a campaign. Before, we could not answer these questions, but now we can.”

Within its wider product portfolio, Realytics has its own TV detection technology that will flag in real-time when an ad has aired, using fingerprinting, but the focus with BEE is using set-top box data to determine exposure, and this is the basis for showing de-duplicated reach across the different ‘channels’ being measured and therefore the incremental reach that addressable TV can deliver.

“Some of the top questions that buyers want answered are: what is the duplication per channel, how do I optimise to avoid duplication, which is the second or third ‘channel’ I should buy [for example, adding BVOD onto a linear campaign first, or using addressable first and then BVOD], and what is the ideal combination of those channels?”

With BEE, buyers can focus on exposure to gain these reach and incremental reach optimisation insights, but there is also the option to investigate performance as a second stage, and this is when Realytics’ TV attribution solution is fired up. “Not everyone is concerned with ‘drive-to-web’ but everyone is concerned with reach and frequency,” Belmas explains.

Realytics expects to expand the footprint where its exposure and attribution technology can be used.

Realytics has a central role in the French addressable TV advertising market, especially through its work with Bouygues Telecom. In addition to providing enhanced capabilities for measuring exposure and effectiveness of addressable TV advertising with the telco, its Adkymia DSP is part of the TVMOTIK alliance and tech stack designed to rationalise buying of linear TV and catch-up addressable TV inventory from multiple broadcasters in Bouygues Telecom homes. This alliance also involves Equative, which contributes campaign development, ad decisioning and scheduling capabilities.

TVMOTIK is based upon the principles of technical harmonisation (including use of AF2M/SNPTV requirements for linear TV) and therefore interoperability, and is designed to rationalise buying across multiple channels for advertisers, providing a one-stop-shop. It includes technology services and sales support. It is viewed as a way to lower the barriers to entry for TV channels of any size if they want to make their inventory available for addressable advertising (on Bouygues Telecom STBs).

Last year, in another project, Realytics worked with SNPTV (the advocacy group for TV and audiovisual advertising media in France), to investigate the effect of using linear TV and addressable TV together. One of the main points of the study was to determine if addressable TV delivers incremental reach on top of linear.

As indicated above, the Realytics product portfolio spans ad detection, ad exposure confirmation, programmatic buying enablement and TV attribution. The Adkymia Demand Side Platform can be used to buy both linear and addressable TV campaigns programmatically and Realytics is also using eight years’ worth of data (and 7 million spot impressions in Europe) to feed AI processing that optimises media buying to maximise drive-to-web impact via this DSP.

Realytics helps advertisers to synchronise their TV and digital campaigns, like timing their paid search (and especially their bidding in order to reach top search spot) to coincide with television ads. This is viewed as a key optimisation that can help ‘drive-to-web’. Online impact can be attributed to TV at a granular level, including on a per-channel (TV distribution channel) or per-day basis. The key principle guiding this technology is the idea that the first impact of TV advertising is usually seen in search.

The company also supports retargeting of exposed TV audiences in digital, including on Facebook, and targeting of non-exposed audiences within digital. There is also the ability to find audiences in the digital space who are lookalikes for the TV exposed audience.

As part of smartclip and RTL Group, Realytics is taking a pan-European view of the cross-platform and addressable TV markets and Belmas believes that in markets where HbbTV is being used by broadcasters to enable addressable TV in free-to-air homes, via television sets, it is realistic to believe we can unify addressable TV planning and buying to cover this and the Pay TV operator STB inventory.

In terms of measurement and attribution, the data available from a telco/Pay TV home is much richer than anything Realytics can get from an HbbTV household, but publisher (broadcaster streaming) data would be one foundation stone for exposure, and other data sources including ACR could be harnessed.

BARB is the first industry-owned audience currency in the world that Netflix has joined. BARB considers itself to be the definitive, trusted measurement of what people across the UK are watching.

Since November 2021, streaming services have been an integral part of BARB’s gold-standard reporting for linear and on-demand services. Its daily reporting includes aggregate-level viewing to SVOD/AVOD and video-sharing platforms, as well as content ratings for shows on the leading SVOD services. This major innovation has been underpinned by technology developed by Kantar.

From the second week of November 2022, BARB will publicly report the monthly reach and share of viewing for broadcaster groups and SVOD/AVOD services which account for more than 0.5% of total identified viewing. Also from November, BARB will extend its weekly reporting of the top 50 shows to include programmes across all linear channels and SVOD service providers. “This will reinforce BARB’s rankings as the most comprehensive and representative record of the most-watched shows in the UK,” the company says.

BARB observes that broadcasters continue to account for the lion’s share of viewing in the UK. “Across 2022, broadcasters’ linear channels and on-demand services have accounted for around two-thirds of all identified viewing, while SVOD/AVOD services comprise about one-sixth of all viewing. The average daily viewing time to broadcasters’ services was 159 minutes in September 2022, and the average for SVOD/AVOD services was 36 minutes per day.”

Conviva’s platform currently supports more than 500 million unique viewers watching 200 billion streams per year across 4 billion applications on devices. Its clients include DAZN, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, Sky, Sling TV and WarnerMedia.

The company’s first major streaming measurement partnership was with NBCUniversal, which came after “highly successful cross-platform measurement pilots” for the Winter Olympics and Superbowl (in collaboration with iSpot, as well). WarnerMedia (Warner Bros. Discovery) and Paramount pursued a measurement strategy for the NCAA Basketball Tournament 2022 using Conviva’s technology to support linear and digital partnerships with Comscore, iSpot and VideoAmp.

Keith Zubchevich, CEO of Conviva, comments: “Audience measurement represents the streaming industry’s biggest opportunity and Conviva’s technology definitively unlocks its potential. For Conviva’s customers, streaming audience is continuously, census-level measured with comprehensive, standardized data.

Having solved for this problem technically, we will now work in lock-step with the industry to provide a unified streaming ad packaging and measurement solution fully interoperable with any cross-platform currency in market today.”

ISBA’s UK Cross Media Measurement Programme, Origin, which aims to execute the global principles and approach for cross media measurement as defined by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), represents a vital step towards making cross media measurement a reality for the UK. Connected TV is a critical part of that mix. Comscore’s recent report Connected TV Advertising in the UK revealed more education was needed before it can be fully utilised.

Defining CTV

We surveyed marketing professionals across the UK to understand their attitudes towards Connected TV (CTV) advertising. 47% of UK households owned a Smart TV in 2019, according to Ofcom. Combined with the number of consumers who own technology which allows them to connect their TV to the Internet (e.g. TV sticks and game consoles), we get a good sense of the mass penetration of CTV among UK consumers.

Despite this, the report revealed that there was a lack of consensus among marketers about what the definition of CTV was. According to the IAB definition, CTV is a ‘television set that is connected to the Internet via OTT devices, Blu-ray players and gaming consoles or has built-in Internet capabilities (i.e., a smart television) and is able to access a variety of longform and short-form web-based content’. However, for the marketers we surveyed CTV advertising and digital video advertising seemed to be interchangeable terms.

Ultimately, CTV is the Internet-enabled device, it is not tied to any one type of content, instead various forms of content can be consumed through CTV, including AVOD and SVOD. Marketers need to have clarity about which content is relevant to be incorporated into the channel, as each type of content offers different advertising opportunities and this distinction will be vital in ensuring accurate and consistent measurement of CTV across the industry.

The Opportunities of CTV

What also stood out from the survey was that the full potential of CTV advertising isn’t yet being realised. Less than half of respondents (49%) recognised the programmatic nature of CTV advertising. In reality, CTV advertising offers programmatic buying with real-time, in depth targeting. There is the potential, with the right partners, for advertisers to purchase inventory based on the specific audience of the campaign as well as on the specific content. This takes us above and beyond the options for linear TV advertising, meaning more flexibility and real brand safety through positive contextual targeting.

Measuring CTV

Whilst there are high hopes for CTV advertising, there are also still some concerns, as is to be expected with any relatively new and growing channel. What stood out from the research was that when asked about their concerns on CTV advertising, the ability to integrate with other media/platforms to create a holistic picture ranked high on the list. Measurement siloed by channel isn’t enough; the survey reinforced the need for cross-media measurement.

To accurately report on the effectiveness of a campaign, advertisers need the full picture. The question is, how does that work when different metrics are used for different channels? Notably, for CTV 58% of respondents felt digital metrics such as impressions and reach would apply best. The concern here is the impact of applying digital metrics to TV viewership, albeit enabled through the Internet. GRPs may be a starting point, as they are applicable to both TV and digital, however there are too many differences for it to be a like-for-like measure.

Impressions and population vary across platform, and other considerations include content length, placement and delivery. With all these variants, the challenge is how to fairly measure CTV, especially in comparison to linear TV. There is clearly more work to be done on understanding the right metrics to measure the impact of CTV advertising, and in understanding how that measures up to other channels.

What now?

Our research shows that whilst there are a lot of opportunities from CTV advertising, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. For the full potential of CTV advertising to be realised, the groundwork needs to be put in to educate the industry further, from defining CTV to understanding the right way to measure its impact. Comscore is committed to driving the industry forward, and we continue to reaffirm its dedication to measuring premium video.

Read the full report here now.