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For VOD Metrics, More Is More

Cable World, Nov 7, 2005

Cable says it's making progress on providing VOD metrics to the advertising community. Madison Avenue isn't so sure.

By Shirley Brady

Tim Hanlon considers himself a VOD zealot. As an SVP at Publicis Group Media Ventures he's ushered numerous advertisers into this emerging platform. But last March Hanlon was steaming, and it had nothing to do with the unseasonable humidity. Anxious to jumpstart the nascent VOD sector, cable operators had announced their intention to report four datapoints for On Demand advertising. To say the advertising community was underwhelmed is a gross understatement.

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"The four data points...are still nowhere near the data sets that we're going to need," Hanlon said in April. Indeed, Hanlon himself had spearheaded a much longer list of 16-17 datapoints as chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) Advanced Television Committee. You get a good measurement of the problem in VOD measurement by contrasting Hanlon's ire with the optimism of Page Thompson, VP and GM of Comcast on Demand. "On Demand is probably already one of the most accurately measured television advertising deliveries ever," Thompson says.

The View

Cable had agreed to report the number of VOD-enabled set-top boxes in a Nielsen market (DMA); the 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. But what constitutes a view, and what does it mean for advertisers? "A view is just the start of a video stream," Hanlon says. "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." In short, a 'view'-in Hanlon's view-meant nothing to his advertisers. What Madison Avenue wants-and fast-is more in-depth, granular reports that incorporate demographics, the key currency of advertisers and agencies.

Fast-forward to last month at a SeaChange-hosted analyst day. The weather in New York was mild, but Hanlon was still steamed. In his view, cable had made very little progress since announcing the four VOD measurements in March. Still, Hanlon's a believer. "This is not a condemnation of the VOD space," he told the analysts as they lunched during his keynote. "You'll find nobody more bullish about the potential for ad-supported On Demand television content. But there are some stumbling blocks that are preventing this business from really ratcheting up."

Cable's Side of the Story-Something's Better Than Nothing

It seems the two sides are far apart. Not so, cable insists. It believes it's been responsive to complaints from Hanlon. Cable acknowledges that the four datapoints were merely a first attempt at a unified starting point. AAAA's list "was not informed by the technology, but by advertising and business people who said 'what would we like to have? Let's come up with a wish list,'" says David Porter, Cox's director of New Media Advertising Development. "So the cable operators got together and said, 'What can we do today? What is consistent and where can we get a baseline for some of these metrics?'"

Cable operators consider the four datapoints phase one, but "they [are] the basis and foundation from which all the other metrics can be derived." Demographics "are certainly in our road map," Warren Schlichting, VP of new business strategy at Comcast, told us in April. Now that cable operators have been reporting their VOD results on a monthly basis, they are going back and taking a hard look at Hanlon's longer wish list.

Now On to Phase Two

Comcast and other operators have been brainstorming about how to make On Demand advertising into a mainstream media buy. Last month the six major MSOs involved in the Innovations in Digital Advertising (ID!A) program, a cross- industry body formed by the DiMA Group, a consortium that promotes On Demand and interactive advertising, said they completed a draft of phase two, which they plan to firm up by Dec. 11.

Among the group's top goals is to make sure that MSOs are using the same definitions in reporting VOD usage. "There were differences in how technically they were handling the information and they've adopted an action plan to correct that anomaly," DiMA EVP Pat Dunbar says. "The goal is to have consistency now that they've agreed on these four datapoints."

Based on Dunbar's comments, MSOs seem to understand Hanlon's frustration. The Id!A group is looking at "recommendations for the next level of detail," she says. "Even with the four datapoints, that isn't yet really at the level of what people see with Internet measurement," Dunbar notes, "so there's an expectation gap in terms of what the gold standard of what people would like to see." Comcast's Thompson agrees. "All the MSOs are interested in providing more data and everyone generally believes that the strength of On Demand advertising lies in our ability to measure what's actually happening," he says. "As soon as the data can be accurately collected and distributed and we can build some common metrics...we're going to provide those to advertisers."

Technology Industry

For VOD Metrics, More Is More

Cable World, Nov 7, 2005

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