With the proliferation of video programming and devices on which to view the content, it is no secret that for many aspects of the cable industry, the times, they are a-changin,' and the field of audience measurement and analytics is not immune from the evolution.
During Cablevision's (NYSE:CVC) quarterly financial call earlier this month, Kristin Dolan, COO and director, noted that the company has been "pretty vocal" about the fact that the current audience measurement system is not working. Cablevision, therefore, has been capturing census-level audience data for about three years now and working on a data analytic service to aid not only operators, but also advertisers and programmers. The effort, thus far, has been "positive," she said.
"We have other MSOs who are securing the same type of data as we are, so we're looking at opportunities to hopefully change the commerce in advertising sales to something that's better for the customer and better for the advertiser," Dolan said.
In this context, "census-level" means the ability to capture data from 100% of households, whereas other measurement methods poll only a sample. "A good percentage of viewing is not measured in today's system," said Ben Tatta, president of Cablevision Media Sales. "The audience is fragmenting across the dial because of the number of (channels) available."
Cablevision, on its own, has been able to gather information from 7 million set-tops and 3 million households. For approximately two years, the company has been publishing a quarterly audience report. The initial push was to start a discussion about what can be done with this level of information, which led to the conclusion that it could be used to significantly impact an advertiser's ability to target customer segments. "We are able to (match) our clients' customer segments to our audience data to target on a more relevant basis, and then on the back end, to measure it. We saw a significant lift in the effectiveness of television advertising," Tatta said.
The next step was to build a portfolio of services for programmers that would allow them to study specific audience types. In October, Cablevision announced an agreement to provide analytics and insights to the Madison Square Garden Co. and more recently signed a deal with ESPN, which will share its digital consumption database to be used alongside the information Cablevision collects. "(We will) match the two together and provide, at a segment level, consumption across platforms," Tatta said, emphasizing that the whole process is done with the utmost concern for consumer privacy and anonymity.
Cablevision also has an agreement with Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) to share census-level data regarding the New York market and is looking for opportunities to work with other operators to make the data accessible and actionable. "In the world of big data today, for us not to have a census-level approach would be a huge miss," Tatta said. "Ratings over time will become much less relevant .... What we have learned (results) in a much more accurate measurement of viewing."
The transition to all-digital is helping to make the collection of census-level data possible, but perhaps the biggest step forward has been the ability to store data in the cloud. This allows the data to be aggregated, normalized and processed in a scalable way, Tatta said.
"As cross-MVPD (multichannel video programming distributor) data becomes available, rather than agree on one data center (location), data can be stored securely on a cloud and linked together," Tatta said.