Unify Converged TV Series 2023: Next-Generation TV Viewership Metrics Are in Their Infancy: Comcast’s Carmela Fournier

LAS VEGAS – Consumers have more ways to watch video programming than ever before, whether they’re tuning into news from a local television station or streaming an on-demand movie. Advertisers, agencies, media owners, and measurement companies are engaged in continual discussions about the best ways to quantify these viewing behaviors to help set the value of ad transactions, or what are known as currencies.

“We’re transitioning to a multicurrency world, and we’re in a test-and-learn phase,” Carmela Fournier, vice president, general manager of data, at Comcast Advertising, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Jon Watts at CES 2023. “We’re evolving from GRPs [gross rating points] over to audience-based impressions. That’s really going help to evolve us to more of a data-first approach.”

The measurement marketplace is becoming more crowded as startups develop new techniques to track viewing behavior. Some of the methodologies are similar to those used for the World Wide Web as more video content is sent from network servers to specific devices with an internet protocol (IP) address.

“Each of these new contenders are putting out their new measurements and people are getting more comfortable with the results, but it’s going to take some time,” Fournier said. “The measurement providers really need to connect into first-party datasets in order to overcome the fragmentation across platforms — as well as the fragmentation of moving from broad age-gender characteristics to more specific advanced advertising characteristics.”

As one of the biggest multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) in the United States, Comcast has a deep trove of first-party data from subscribers.

“We want the measurement providers to lean into the rich datasets that we have, particularly as it relates to cross-platform,” Fournier said. “The tie of an IP address to the household-based tuning data and viewership data is really important in order to get the numbers correct, but also to drive scale and help to evolve us into a more cross-platform world.”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 #convergedTV #CES