Content provided in partnership with

Will Cable Meet Advertisers' Demands?

Cable World, April 18, 2005

Ad buyers have a clear message for cable: "Show us the metrics, and we'll show you the money."

By Shirley Brady

Starcom MediaVest's Tim Hanlon wants more from Brian Roberts. More data, that is. Last month, Roberts told the American Association of Advertising Agencies' annual Media Conference in New Orleans that Comcast was ready to start supplying VOD usage data to advertisers and their agencies. Given that the biggest cable operator is on track to record 1 billion VOD streams and deliver 10,000 hours of VOD content by the end of this year, the 4As' members were eager to listen.

Most Popular Articles in Technology: An overview of continuous data protection; Why all those current ratings?; Many countries now have a mobile penetration rate above 100%, report says; The Tata Group's big telecom gamble: VSNL's recent acquisition of Tyco ...; MEASURING BANK BRANCH EFFICIENCY USING DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS: MANAGERIAL ...; More »

Fourteen months earlier, at the 4As' conference in Orlando, the group's advanced television committee put forward guidelines listing discrete types of VOD viewing reporting and measurements. The group's members needed the guidelines to start creating a real business around VOD advertising.

Hanlon, SVP at Starcom MediaVest and chairman of the 4As committee, was underwhelmed with Roberts' plan. Comcast would start reporting four data measurements monthly: the number of VOD-enabled set-top boxes in a DMA; total views by program per month; the number of unique set-top boxes viewing a program per month; and the total minutes viewed by program per month.

Advertisers and agencies would not be charged for the reports. And each VOD content provider would receive program-specific reports for its own content, not Nielsen-style rankings showing its performance vis-a-vis others.

Comcast's commitment was not nearly enough to get advertisers to support VOD, Hanlon said.

"My real issue is that the four data points that Comcast has thrown out there--and has effectively asked other operators to join in on--are still nowhere near the data sets that we're going to need," said Hanlon. "The [number of VOD-enabled set-top boxes]--that's helpful. I still don't know what a 'view' is...A view is just the start of a video stream; it doesn't tell us anything about minute one, minute two, minute 17. So if an ad message doesn't hit until the third minute in a video stream, we don't know if it was viewed, we just know that it was started."

Even Roberts acknowledged that Comcast's move to provide measurements within 10 days of each month's end was a first step (albeit "a big step"). Roberts knows that Comcast and its brethren in the cable industry have a long way to go before they'll meet the demands of advertisers and their agencies. In particular, advertisers want operators to work with Nielsen Media to deliver the kinds of metrics that will quantify the return on their investments in VOD advertising. They want demographic information about individual users, not about set-top boxes.

"We need more than monthly data," Jon Mandel, chairman of the MediaCom media-buying agency, said on a VOD advertising panel at the National Show in San Francisco earlier this month. "We need specific data."

"Demographics are certainly in our road map," said Comcast Spotlight VP Warren Schlichting, who heads up Spotlight's VOD ad sales. He said that Comcast's goal in this first phase of data points "is uniformity as opposed to granularity." It's incumbent on Comcast to create and describe to the industry the next phase of data points, he added. "We've got to get timely and precise data out to everybody that has any stake in the VOD platform."

Schlichting is eager to get this first phase of data working smoothly before adding more metrics to the mix. "It's our goal to continue to shorten the gap between month's end and when the data gets disseminated, and then also to standardize across the four data points that Cox, Time Warner Cable and ourselves have put forward," he said. "We do need to show we can do that on a very consistent, very regular basis."

Hanlon credits Schlichting for admitting that what's going on is a retrofit of a system that was designed for movie delivery, in which the beginning of a movie is just a billing event. "It's just [that] the reason that we put out those guidelines [last year] was to give people something to aim for," Hanlon said. "I look at what was announced in New Orleans by Brian as a very welcome step forward, but we've got a long journey yet to go."

Airing Grievances in San Francisco

Like Mandel, Hanlon attended the National Show to sound a wake-up call to the broader cable industry. His eagerness to bring his clients' ad budgets to cable's VOD platforms has been met mostly with frustration. "We're no further along than we were three years ago," Hanlon said, speaking as a member of a panel on VOD programming. "It is challenging to convince advertisers that VOD is an ad-supportable platform when we don't have anything close to reasonable metrics. We have not begun to figure out what the ad pieces look like--short form, long form, 30-second spots--and we are in the middle of a scrap between local ad salespeople and national ad salespeople over who gets what inventory."

Technology Industry

Will Cable Meet Advertisers' Demands?

Cable World, April 18, 2005

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Home & Garden

Most Popular Articles in Technology

Most Popular Publications in Technology