LOS ANGELES – Once upon a time, measuring TV ads was straightforward, if not terribly effective.

Now, the increasing likelihood is that the practice will be owned by every actor in the system and will mean far higher accuracy.

That is the vision according to Kris Magel, VP and head of agency development at Samba TV.

In this video interview with Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet.TV’s Beet Retreat Santa Monica, Magel says there are core three dynamics already at play:

  1. More first-party data: “Marketers are gathering a lot of data on their customers and they want to leverage that data in every possible way across their business – and that includes advertising.”
  2. Identity graphs rising: “There are a lot of companies that are gathering identifiers to try to be able to map households and people and devices in a privacy-compliant way.”
  3. Targetable media: “On top of that, you have this increasing amount of addressability that’s available in media.”

The measurement trifecta

In that maelstrom, who really owns measurement anymore, Swartz asked?

Magel’s answer? Everyone. “It’s the trifecta,” he says:

  1. “Marketers have a responsibility to gather data in a very privacy-compliant way and gain permission and consent from their consumers.”
  2. “Media companies really need to do the same thing.”
  3. “Agencies are responsible for bringing a lot of that together, across many different media providers.”

Multi-layered measurement

All of that is going to change the way that modern ad measurement gets done.

In fact, it’s going to be a lot less one-dimensional and a bit more like 3D chess.

“I think measurement tomorrow is going to be multilayered instead of counting audiences,” Magel says.

“You’re going to go further, take it a step further and look at that de-duplicated reach and frequency contribution, make smart decisions about what’s working and what’s not.

“You’ll even look at the ROI impact on the backend. You have the ability to match that up against what those people did after they were exposed to the advertising.

“So, you’ll be looking at lots of different metrics and what that will ultimately do, I think measurement will be a bigger part of what everybody has been doing in media than in the past.”

Samba’s measurement dance

Samba TV itself has software embedded in smart TV devices from 24 companies, giving it insight on “46 million addressable TV devices globally powering the world’s largest end-to-end viewership data and household identity graph”, according to the company.

After initially just offering access to viewing data from automatic content recognition (ACR), the company has expanded its offering.

This summer, it launched its own SambaID. Now the company has two currencies of its own.

But the company has also partnered with the likes of Comscore, Kantar and Lucid to work with other currencies, too.

You are watching coverage from Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2021, presented by FreeWheel, IRIS.TV, Samba TV, TransUnion & Warner Music Group. For more videos, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews