Cross-media measurement: how the industry is rebuilding its currencies
Panels were built for one screen. With viewing split across broadcast, streaming and mobile, the US and Europe are rebuilding the currencies TV and radio are traded on.
A media currency is the number both sides agree to trade on. For decades television had one — panel-based ratings — and radio had another, built on listening diaries and later on meters. Both were designed for a world where a household watched one screen and listened to one radio, and both are being rebuilt because that world is gone.
What broke
The same programme now reaches an audience through broadcast, a broadcaster's own streaming app, a third-party platform, and a phone. A panel sized to measure the first of those cannot see the rest, so the reported figure understates reach while the advertiser's own analytics report something different again.
When buyer and seller cannot agree on the number, they stop arguing about price and start arguing about arithmetic — which is slower and worse for both.
What is being built instead
The direction of travel is consistent across the US and Europe, whatever the local acronym: keep a panel for calibration, add census-level data from set-top boxes, streaming platforms and smart TVs for scale, and reconcile the two into a single deduplicated figure per person rather than per household.
The recurring obstacles are also consistent:
- Deduplication. One viewer seen by three data sources must count once, and matching them without a shared identifier is the hard technical problem.
- Governance. Whoever owns the currency is trusted by the whole market or by none of it, which makes joint-industry structures slow but necessary.
- Privacy. Census data is personal data, and the rules differ by country.
- Continuity. A new currency that breaks comparison with last year's campaign is commercially unusable, however accurate it is.
Radio's version of the same problem
Audio faces it in a sharper form, because its distribution fragmented earlier. The NFL research published by Westwood One this month is a good illustration: streaming and satellite tune-in outpaced traditional AM/FM listening three to one for the same broadcasts. A currency that counts only over-the-air listening describes a minority of the actual audience.
What sellers should take from it
Currencies will keep changing, and no broadcaster controls when. What a seller does control is whether its own systems can carry more than one at a time — quote in the old currency for buyers who still trade on it, in the new one for those who have moved, and reconcile both against the same inventory.
The broadcasters that handled previous transitions well were not the ones with the best forecast. They were the ones whose commercial systems did not have to be rewritten every time the measurement changed.