Buyers Want Better Measurement, but Will Use Old Metrics in Upfront

New Metrics And Brand Safety are just two issues that media buyers who control billions of ad dollars say will be considered before their old-fashioned negotiations determine which networks will be winners and losers in the upfront.

Several of the buyers think better measurement could help TV, but they expect the current metrics, C7 and C3, to remain the currency for this year.

The buyers endorse the idea of audience buying and believe the addition of NBCUniversal to the OpenAP consortium will push advanced advertising forward. For now, though, they say it remains a small factor in the market.

Multichannel News asked some of TV's top buyers about some of the news surrounding the market. Their answers follow.

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MCN: How will NBCUniversal's decision to work with OpenAP partners Fox, Turner and Viacom affect how much money flows into audience buying? Do you think they'll be able to create a unified system for planning and buying audience-based campaigns?

Dani Benowitz, executive VP, strategic investment, Magna: Advertisers are organically moving dollars into the space as it evolves, regardless of the networks' involvement in OpenAP. While OpenAP was a step in the right direction, it isn't the tool itself that's incentivizing and driving spend it's the desire to bring data and audience precision to traditional media channels. The hope is that with more (and larger) networks joining the consortium, the road towards an execution/transaction tool will become a short one.

It is definitely a realistic goal, as there are platforms currently available in the marketplace that currently offer a centralized system for planning and buying. It will be up to OpenAP to either license and adapt existing platforms, a definitively shorter route, or create their own proprietary tool. The recent addition of NBCU adds validity and scalability to the platform and we anticipate more advertisers taking advantage.

Chris Geraci, OMD

Chris Geraci, president, national video investment, OMD: We welcome NBCU's forthcoming participation in OpenAP as we are committed to advancing and facilitating the practice of audience- based buying beyond age/gender demography at scale. The NBCU addition to OpenAP validates this approach to media buying and planning. As the first addition to the consortium since its launch, it is a positive step for OpenAP, which has not seen any membership momentum in its first year of operation. However, the challenge of evaluating a campaign using advanced targeting across all media companies still needs to be solved.

While we are encouraged by the expansion of OpenAP and the evolution of the platform itself, we believe that audience-based optimization of video is best served by proprietary agency platforms.

Mike Law, executive VP, managing director, U.S. media investment, Amplifi US, Dentsu Aegis Network: Audience-based buying will continue to grow at pace as we move forward. Our ability to target strategic audiences and increase reach against the hardest-to-find audiences is critical for our brands. OpenAP is a critical platform to help create consistency in the definition and sizing of audiences across partners, and NBCU joining helps to create more scale in the space. We are excited to see all of the networks making bigger investments in audience-based data products and evolving our negotiations to consider alternatives to legacy currency models.

Dave Penski, Publicis Media Exchange

Dave Penski, CEO, Publicis Media Exchange: This is a positive, albeit small, step in the right direction for the networks to move towards a more unified system. Right now, the amount of money flowing through audience buying on automated platforms is very small. The reason is that we are still buying national units until all units are made addressable; the new data does not help solve these issues. Agencies and clients have long had sophisticated data about audiences and could make informed decisions about what to buy. Furthermore, OpenAP is just on the planning side, and all buying is still in different systems for each vendor.

Lyle Schwartz, president of investment, North America, GroupM: Richer audience data can only benefit programmers. However, the insights that a client and their agency build for themselves about audiences across the entire video spectrum remain an important component of leverage in negotiations.

MCN: How much are data privacy at Facebook, content safety at YouTube and transparency and effectiveness issues with digital advertising affecting spending on TV?

Benowitz: While these concerns have resulted in a few big advertisers turning away from digital and back to TV, overall we have not seen a huge migration back to traditional TV. TV itself has been seeing an ongoing erosion of ratings and shift in consumption of content, so if anything the above effect has led to a slight acceleration of spend to FEP [full-episode programming] and other OTT distributors.

Geraci: To some degree, these issues continue to support demand for television among large, well-established advertisers and the agencies that serve them. While the value in precision targeting and younger-skewing audiences among social media platforms and user distributors of user-generated content is well-established, we have also seen the downside of brands being associated with unsavory material and other issues associated with digital-based video offerings. At the same time, television has its own set of issues with regard to audience measurement and, at times, unanticipated controversy surrounding on-air content and offair behavi

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