Madison Avenue joins the quest to open the black box of viewership data

The Future. Madison Avenue and Hollywood are teaming up to certify the results of new audience-measurement systems. The hope is to finally create a baseline for viewership metrics, especially for streaming. With the venture likely to drag the data into the daylight, Hollywood unions may be taking the gas off of viewership transparency as a key demand in upcoming contract negotiations that could potentially put the whole entertainment industry at a standstill.

Count the eyeballs
Top ad buyers, including Dentsu, GroupM, and Horizon Media, are partnering up with the US Joint Industry Committee, a consortium led by Fox, Paramount, NBCUniversal, TelevisaUnivision, Warner Bros. Discovery, and their jointly-owned OpenAP.

• Their goal: create a minimum standard of quality that new audience-measuring techs like  Samba, ComScore, and iSpot need to meet to be accepted by the industry.
• It also puts pressure on Nielsen to step up its game, which has been an ongoing battle for studios.
• They’ll be graded on elements such as infrastructure, privacy, interoperability, and governance.

The hope is to roll out a new measurement ecosystem before 2024.

Waiting for the curtain to fall
After ten years of streaming chaos, the move to create a unified measurement ecosystem reflects just how badly both industries want some semblance of data transparency. Everyone wants to know what is objectively a hit.

So, relying on the limited or cherry-picked viewership numbers that Netflix, Hulu, and all the streamers offer just no longer makes sense when they’re all launching ad-tiers. Accurate results are paramount.