Another nail in the coffin for traditional ad measurement metrics?

NBCUniversal has become the latest media owner to launch its own effort to quantify impact for advertisers.

It’s called Total Investment Impact, an attempt to measure the effectiveness of advertising across campaigns, screens and platforms, focused not on simple impressions but on business results.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kavita Vazirani, EVP, Insights & Measurement and NBCUniversal, explains the idea.

Ongoing relationship

“Advertising isn’t just about buying and selling spots,” Vazirani says.

“We really want to shift the dialogue from impressions and exposures to measurable impact. How are we driving sales for our advertisers? How are we moving cars off of lots?

“So we have invested significant amount in our data and modelling capabilities to build a model that’s going to allow us to look at performance on an ongoing basis.

“We’re able to make recommendations on what is the best plan for you, for a marketer, to activate on, that is going to drive sales? And all of those results get fed back into our model to have this ongoing optimization on a metric that is more important to the marketer, which is sales, than just impressions.”

Changing behavior

The launch comes as NBCUniversal also launches an insight report into how audience behavior is changing.

Its One Audience Trends report used proprietary data from across NBCUniversal services.

Interesting results are:

  • Amongst 18-to-34s, a huge 76% of viewing is now time-shifted.
  • NBCUniversal content has seen a 20% year-on-year bump in digital consumption.
  • That includes a 95% growth for connected TV and 37% for personal devices.
  • TV still accounts for the vast majority of the company’s consumption.
  • But cross-platform ad exposure significantly boosted visitation by more than 75% compared to TV-only exposures
  • Fear of missing out (FOMO) drives a halo of on-demand viewing in the couple of days after live transmission.