MANAGEMENT
December 2016
17
All about the count
Nielsen offers Total Audience Measurement, a multi-platform tool that acts as a
single source platform.
❝Often, what is suitable for
in-home TV measurement
cannot be replicated for
digital screens due to
fragmented audiences.❞
— Craig Johnson,
Head of Reach Solutions, South-east
Asia, North Asia and Pacific, Nielsen
important to make sure each
platform can be compared and
duplication removed.
“Comparable metrics across
factors such as how long, how
often and how much needs to be
collected allows an average audience for any piece of advertising
or content to be quantified and
reported.”
In Asia-Pacific, Johnson
paints Singapore pay-TV operator StarHub as a leading example
of how companies are beginning
to grasp a “great understanding”
of what is needed from audience
measurement, and from there,
to push on to make sure all their
audiences are captured.
Last year, StarHub launched
its SmarTAM system, which was
developed together with Nielsen.
Presented as Singapore’s first
Television Audience Measurement (TAM) system using Return
Path Data (RPD) technology,
SmarTAM ‘harvests’ RPD from
StarHub’s two-way digital set-top
boxes (STBs) and applies Nielsen’s
proprietary research for TV viewership measurement.
Each Asia-Pacific country has
its own set of challenges around
measurement technology, says
Johnson, as he reveals that pilots
are under way in various countries
in the region to cover measurement from the single TV household to mobile streaming.
Because Asia-Pacific remains
one of the most fragmented and
diversified regions in the world,
operators will continue to deploy
different approaches for audience
measurement across linear and
non-linear platforms, remarks
Stéphane Le Dreau, general man-
ager, South-east Asia, Nagra.
Whether such an approach
is sustainable in the long term,
however, is debatable, suggests
Le Dreau. “2016 saw many new
developments in the pay-TV space
with a myriad of online TV services such as Netflix and iflix being
rolled out in more countries across
South-east Asia. To understand
what viewers want, it is essential
to know where and how viewers
are consuming content.”
He urges operators to consider
adopting a unified measurement
strategy that applies across different platforms and provides a
holistic view of customers’ viewing habits.
The transition to IP can also
be advantageous; in any event,
OTT delivery is already the norm
for many TV operators. Le Dreau
continues: “Distributing video
over IP can provide access to a vast
amount of data that can be utilised
to derive valuable and actionable
customer insights, without compromising the viewer’s privacy.
“For instance, tracking and
measuring viewer data can allow
advertisers to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign or help
service providers to shape their
channel line-up and subscription
tiering.”
Armed with insights based on
With the emergence of new viewing possibilities
and actors, the TV market is constantly moving and
changing. To meet the challenge of continuing to
track content wherever they are consumed, audience measurement tools need to be “as exhaustive
and precise as possible”, Julien Rosanvallon, director
of Médiamétrie’s Television Department, told APB.
As early as 2011, the French audience measurement company, in recognition of evolving TV
viewing habits, decided to integrate time-shifted
audiences in Mediamat, the company’s TV audience
measurement tool.
In 2014, catch-up TV was added into the mix and
since the beginning of this year, catch-up TV results
were also available programme-by-programme.
Rosanvallon added: “We’ve also been working on four-screen TV audience measurement;
that is, the performance of programmes, whether
broadcast on TV, computer, mobile phone or tablet
screens.
“Since April 2016, we have been delivering fourscreen rating on a daily basis. By the end of this
year, we’ll be able to add demographics analysis at
a channel level.”
Whether on linear or non-linear platforms, it is
equally important to create common indicators to
support deep and precise analysis of any content,
wherever and whenever it is broadcasted.
In essence, this should reflect the total TV usage of the population, said Rosanvallon, adding:
“On the other hand, we also need to report usage
in conjunction with advertising models. For that
reason, it was very important for the French market
to distinguish time-shift viewing from video-ondemand (VoD), simply because these formats do
not support the same ad model — the first has
the same ads as broadcast TV, the latter supports
online-based targeted ads.”
Looking into the future, Médiamétrie believes
that TV audience measurement will adopt a hybrid
guise, and will increasingly rely on Return Path Data
— an area where Médiamétrie is actively working on
with the likes of French pay-TV operator Canalsat.
“The inclusion of larger samples will allow us to better address media fragmentation and the need for
more granularity,” explaine