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What does a media company do after leading a charge to supplant Nielsen as the TV industry’s longstanding measurement currency?
For NBCUniversal, the next frontier is widening the measurable variables in an ad campaign. Kelly Abcarian, EVP, measurement and impact, advertising and partnerships, framed out the company’s ambitions in a blog post last week, writing: “We are exploring how we can value ad quality and embrace accountability across the board and connect the emotions ads create with the content to the impact it generates.”
The idea is being able to widen accountability for ads’ impact — namely, the efficacy of the creative in resonating with viewers and the ability of publishers to maximize ads’ reach on their channels. Agencies and publishers share the responsibility for impact, and the data is there to show it.
“As we go on this journey to impact, we wanted to ensure that we could start to bring together how we can protect our position as a premium publisher but really move toward making more complete data-informed outcome guarantees by contextualizing the end market performance of the creative decisions,” Abcarian says, her penchant for abstraction likely suited for the task in front of her.
After all, how does one measure some increasingly abstract variables in order to pin down the accountability NBCU is pursuing? How to quantify emotion with any useful accuracy, let alone scaffold that data out to connect to a business outcome?
NBCU initiated a wide request for proposals to kickstart that process, and