06 executive summary theibcdaily
Target practice The power of big data
Andy Brown
Chairman, Kantar Media Region: Global
Interview by Adrian Pennington I
f anyone can shortcut the hyperbole surrounding ‘big data’, it’s Andy Brown, chairman at WPP-owned consultancy Kantar Media. He has 25 years of expertise in audience and marketing research including sojourns at Anglia TV and the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), now part of WPP. He was a founding director of KMR Group (the holding structure for BMRB), and became its CEO in 2001, then Kantar Media boss in 2010. “A fundamental limitation of ‘big data’ is that it doesn’t collect attitudinal information,” he says. “It tells you who is watching, but not why. So it’s essential that we retain classic market research – such as panel measurement – alongside return path data (RPD), and social media data.”
Kantar has been tracking RPD for a decade and runs services for broadcasters in ten countries, including for BSkyB’s SkyView. It is looking at ways RPD data can be integrated with people meters and how video can be tracked across platforms so that digital and broadcast teams can trade with the same information. “The great challenge is to find a metric that is broadly acceptable to both online and broadcast worlds,” he says. “In practice that means that someone has got to change or adapt their metrics.” Kantar was recently appointed by BARB, the official source of television viewing figures in the UK, to collect census data for TV viewing through all computer devices, including tablets. Field tests of a new app, which are still ongoing, should lead to the roll- out of a solution for measuring BARB panellists’ viewing on tablets and smartphones by the end of the year. This will supplement the PC viewing that is already tracking in 700 panel homes. “It’s worth reminding ourselves that over-the-air transmissions
still represent the majority of television viewing in the UK’s 26 million households,” says Brown, who visited IBC for the first time this year.
Arguably the biggest danger for the uninitiated is knee-jerk reactions to data from social media which can be culled in vast volume and almost instantly. “Can we evaluate a programme’s engagement using social media?” asks Brown rhetorically. Kantar Media has also struck a partnership with Twitter to provide broadcasters with information about how their shows are being talked about online. The social media giant is already paired with Neilsen in the US and Kantar hopes to integrate Twitter data with its existing BARB ratings service to provide clients with richer information on how their programming and advertising is performing. The audience measurement firm runs a realtime ratings service for live content to all the major networks in Latin America. “Clients use it in a tactical way,” says Brown. “If a particular artist on a live chat show is not very popular and the ratings show loss of share, then they could alter the schedule. In news, if a particular story is not resonating with the audience, they could rotate it for something else. I can see realtime data from Facebook or Twitter augmenting that process to provide realtime feedback on how content is being received.” Brown sits on the boards of both Kantar Digital and the WPP Digital Advisory group and has been playing a vital role in the development of the company’s digital operations.
“Google is one of our biggest clients,” he says. “They want to see beyond what passes through their search engine, what passes beyond that of their platform,” says Brown. “They want to know what is happening in other businesses.”
“Google wants to see beyond what passes through their search engine”
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