Unify Converged TV Series 2023: Measurement Standards Will Help to Future-Proof TV Advertising: WBD’s Andrea Zapata

LAS VEGAS – The measurement of television audiences has been in flux as buyers and sellers of advertising seek metrics that accurately reflect the major change in people’s viewing behavior since the onset of the pandemic. Getting past the test-and-learn phase of developing new measurement tools that can be scaled for mass audiences has been a gradual process.

“The transition is real, but last year we didn’t know what we didn’t know. This year, we have confidence in what we do know now,” Andrea Zapata, executive vice president, head of ad sales research at Warner Bros. Discovery, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Jon Watts at CES 2023.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for us to actually learn in the next couple of quarters about how we can actually make sure we can integrate these datasets into our own systems internally so we can get to a place where we’re transacting at scale,” she said, “but also how do we work with our agency partners…or other media publishers to make sure that we’re thinking not just about the short-term opportunity, but really future-proofing measurement and currency.”

Such future-proofing of measurement standards demands collaboration among a variety of businesses and organizations. The goal is to make audience measurement among different media channels more comparable in setting the value of ad transactions, or what’s known as a currency.

“To be currency-grade is not just hard, but it takes a lot of investments,” Zapata said. “We want to make sure that we’re not just focused on counting but really thinking about the holistic measurement picture from counting to efficacy. So, this is going to take a little bit of time.”

You’re watching “Establishing Measurement Standards in a Converged TV World,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series produced at CES 2023, presented by Innovid. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. For all of our coverage from CES 2023, please click here: https://bit.ly/3GgJx5j #admeasurement #CES