The Walt Disney Company will take a significant step toward equalizing the business of advertising on television and online this spring when three of the networks owned by the company, ABC, ABC Family and ESPN, offer advertisers guarantees for video programming distributed both on television and online.
The ABC networks will announce Tuesday that they have adopted the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings system to measure viewing across both television and online sites, and will base all sales on estimates of what total viewing will be on all those platforms.
Traditionally, television networks guarantee advertisers that they will deliver a certain numbers of viewers in specific demographic groups. When viewing falls short of those numbers, the networks provide free commercial time to make up the difference.
But online viewing has lacked a service that could provide similar information for video streamed online. ABC has been aggressively seeking a way to combine guarantees both on television and online. Adam Gerber, vice president of sales development and marketing for ABC, said the company gave combined viewing guarantees to some advertisers in last year’s upfront – the sales period in spring when networks made deals with advertisers for future programming — but expected “a much more robust demand for those kinds of deals” this year.
“We are seeing a rapidly growing demand for cross-platform deals,” Mr. Gerber said.
The Nielsen service will provide detailed information on online viewing in two ways, said Steve Hasker, the president of Global Products for Nielsen. One is information that will go to the advertisers about the reach of specific ad campaigns. “If an auto maker places ads on all different platforms, on television and online, we’ll be able to measure all the people that see that particular campaign,” Mr. Hasker said.
That will be possible because the commercials will carry a specific tag to identify them, he said.
But for a network to be able to offer a ratings guarantee, it needs a way to get an accurate measure of total viewing of each program, which may take place on numerous different online sites. Mr. Hasker said the Nielsen system would be able to keep track of how many times people watched the show on any online sight as long as the program contained a tag provided by the network.
Mr. Gerber noted that the problem in the past with online viewing was that a headcount was possible, but not the information on the makeup of the audience that advertisers require. Nielsen is solving that by using data provided by Facebook to identify the characteristics of the online viewers.
In some respects, online advertising enjoys advantages over television advertising because in most cases online commercials cannot be skipped by viewers, and they can be easily swapped: a commercial for a movie opening on Friday that might get out of date if watched on a delayed basis on television can be replaced online with a more up-to-date commercial.
At the moment, advertisers pay only for the commercials watched in a television program within three days of its air date. But Nielsen issues reports on viewing that accumulates over a full week. Mr. Hasker said the combined television and online audience of video would be reported on the basis of a week’s worth of viewing — even though online episodes of shows stay active on sites for a month or more.
He credited ABC with being “especially innovative” in its approach to offering guarantees for online advertising as well for television viewing, but he said that Nielsen was in active conversations with numerous other big television companies about adopting the combined ratings service.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/abc-networks-will-offer-guarantees-to-advertisers-across-platforms/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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