A healthy advertising ecosystem includes advancements in cross-screen measurement that help marketers to improve the efficiency of their media buying. Several industry executives discussed the status of measurement in a fragmented marketplace when they gathered on June 23 for the Global Forum on Responsible Media, 

This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the cross-screen measurement track presented by Nielsen: 

1. Unified measurement for multiple screens 

Marketers face bigger challenges in measuring media consumption among different viewing devices, including mobile phones and smart TVs, to get a more unified view of consumers. The goal is to marry bottom-up measurement that’s common among digital advertisers with top-down modeling, said Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. 

2. Consumer panel provides more in-depth insights 

Brands have access to troves of data about how their ads were delivered, but measuring their effectiveness on consumers takes another level of research. TV ratings company Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population. 

“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” said Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at  Nielsen. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.” 

Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, agrees that panel information is critical for in-depth insights. 

“The reason the panel remains critical is that you need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” he said. 

3. Measurement includes outcomes 

“In addition to measuring delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it or that we shouldn’t try to evolve that measurement,” said Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at Wavemaker. 

Measuring impact includes an analysis of how different media touchpoints help brands to achieve their objectives in terms of sales, awareness and brand consideration.  

“It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content,” said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence. “We’re at the early stages of developing measurement solutions that really help us understand that into the media model.” 

There’s room for experimentation in achieving  results as measurement will never achieve a “perfect” level of insights, said Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at Wavemaker, GroupM 

“We won’t have perfect, but we have to come at this from the lens of what is the best option for this campaign,” he said. 

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page 

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.