Media measurement is at a critical juncture, with the industry racing to adapt to new technologies, shifting consumer behaviors, and evolving regulatory frameworks. 

As TV and video consumption splinters across devices and platforms, the need for consistent, reliable identity resolution (IDR) has become increasingly urgent. The complexities of audience fragmentation and data loss have forced companies to rethink how they approach identity and measurement at scale.

To that end, CIMM, in collaboration with OpenAP, launched a strategic review of the identity resolution ecosystem to address the challenges of stitching together data across disparate identity spines. 

David Levy, CEO of OpenAP, has been at the forefront of these efforts, emphasizing the importance of durable, privacy-safe identity solutions that can serve both buyers and sellers in the advanced TV landscape. OpenAP’s commitment to this project reflects its broader goal of establishing a more transparent and interoperable marketplace, ensuring that IDR evolves to meet the growing demands of advertisers and consumers alike.

Dennis Buchheim, Managing Director of ThinkMedium, shared that while identity resolution has made strides, the current environment is “fragmented and inconsistent,” calling for data quality and interoperability improvements. He emphasized the need for more transparency, saying, “The industry must work together to create an adaptable, privacy-safe identity ecosystem that can evolve with changing regulations and consumer expectations.”

At the recent CIMM Summit, sessions provided a look at the industry today with a roadmap for what lies ahead as data quality, transparency, and interoperability dominate the conversation.

5 Big Ideas We Took Away From CIMM Summit

Insight 1: Identity Resolution Is Still Fragmented — But Progress Is Being Made

The complexity of identity resolution continues to challenge the TV and video marketplace, but significant advancements are being made.

• Fragmentation Issues: The TV identity ecosystem is fragmented, with different identity spines and providers offering disparate solutions, making it difficult to track audiences across multiple screens and devices.
• Comcast’s Solution: Comcast’s deterministic signal authentication offers a promising privacy-safe solution to unify fragmented audience data, yet broader industry standardization remains elusive.
• Data Quality Challenges: The lack of data quality in some identity resolution practices is a consistent concern, with many speakers calling for more transparency and better labeling of data sources.
• Need for Buyer Education: As identity solutions evolve, marketers need more education around data quality and transparency, ensuring that they understand the signals they are working with and how those signals influence campaign outcomes.

Insight 2: Fragmentation of Media is Both a Blessing and a Curse

The rise of programmatic buying and connected TV (CTV) is transforming how media is bought and sold, but the growing complexity is a double-edged sword for buyers.

• Opportunities for Personalization: In the session Building the TV Ad Market of the Future, speakers like Freewheel’s Mark McKee and LG Ad Solutions’ Michael Hudes pointed to opportunities that media fragmentation offers. McKee described how personalization across fragmented content creates new touchpoints for audience engagement.

• Challenges in Measurement: As content spreads across different platforms, buyers face the growing challenge of managing reach and frequency. As Katie Klein noted, the difficulty lies in tracking audiences across a fragmented media landscape while delivering meaningful performance metrics.
• The Role of LG Ads Innovation Lab: Hudes emphasized that behavioral and emotional cues are critical to surfacing relevant content, making personalization even more integral to managing fragmented content across multiple devices.

Insight 3: The Shift to Multi-Currency Measurement is Gaining Momentum

Multi-currency measurement is quickly becoming necessary in advanced TV, but implementation is still in its early days.

• Enabling Optionality: During Ready or Not, The Advanced TV Ad Market Is Here, panelists like Paramount’s Michele Stone stressed that offering measurement flexibility — allowing buyers to transact based on the currency they’re comfortable with — is critical to the future of advertising. As agencies work with multiple measurement providers, they are increasingly focused on aligning these metrics to serve both buyers and sellers effectively.

• Growing Complexity: Publicis Media’s Sam Armando highlighted the complexity agencies face when dealing with multiple currencies during major events like the Super Bowl, where several measurement systems must work together. The challenge lies in ensuring consistency across these systems while maintaining accuracy.

Insight 4: AI’s Role in Measurement is Just Beginning

AI-driven media measurement is still in its infancy, but it has the potential to revolutionize how media is planned, bought, and measured.

• AI for Personalization and Automation: In the session Into the Future of Media Measurement, panelists discussed how AI will drive more personalized and immersive experiences by 2030. Automating content delivery and optimizing audience engagement is seen as a major benefit.

• Ongoing Challenges: AI also introduces challenges. As Sonata Insights’ Debra Aho Williamson pointed out in the AI-Driven Roadmap to 2030, questions around transparency, data ethics, and the accuracy of AI-driven insights remain unresolved. CIMM”s Tameka Kee stressed the importance of industry-wide collaboration to address these issues and ensure AI can deliver on its promises.

Insight 5: CTV’s Growing Influence on Performance Metrics

Connected TV (CTV) now plays a bigger role in performance-based advertising, offering brands opportunities to drive outcomes that were once difficult to measure with linear TV.

• Impact of Live Audiences: IPG Media Brands’ Maureen Bosetti noted that while linear TV still offers significant reach, CTV complements it with advanced performance metrics. Brands are increasingly using CTV’s flexible formats to deliver both brand-building and performance-driven campaigns.

• Cross-Screen Attribution: As highlighted by the panelists in Building the TV Ad Market of the Future, the ability to track audience behaviors across multiple screens is improving, with programmatic buying allowing advertisers to optimize reach and frequency in previously challenging ways.

Navigating these growing complexities — identity resolution, audience fragmentation, and measurement standardization — requires collaboration across the sell-side, buy-side, and tech platforms. 

The future of media measurement depends on the industry’s ability to adopt multi-currency frameworks, embrace AI-driven solutions, and improve the cross-screen attribution model to reflect today’s fragmented viewing habits. As AI integration advances and CTV continues its rise, the next steps will involve finding ways to unify fragmented data ecosystems and develop scalable solutions for cross-screen measurement.

Moving forward, the industry must keep pace with technological innovations and regulatory shifts to ensure that identity resolution and media measurement evolve together to support advertisers, publishers, and viewers alike.

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CTV advertising will top $30 billion in 2024, a 22% increase over 2023. Clearly, advertisers are leaning into TV advertising, but they’ll face significant implications in terms of privacy. 

To help marketers navigate the privacy landscape, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and the 4As released a comprehensive report, Privacy and the Future of TV Advertising, to

• Offers a structured approach to understanding partner and technology solutions and their underlying data sets within a complex, ever-changing landscape – a fundamental step to navigating privacy-forward practices.
• Proposes four frameworks that break down the complexity of privacy in the advertising industry by detailing stakeholders, use cases, privacy themes, and established and emerging solutions and technologies.
• Provides a Solutions Heatmap that assesses the privacy risks and relative efficiency and industry adoption across many types of solutions (weighted to provide Overall Viability Scores)

Let’s look at some of the highlights of each framework.

Stakeholder & Use Case Framework

The report identifies multiple stakeholders who are responsible for data-related functions that support advertising, from data access, collection, preparation (aggregating and packaging data for use by other ecosystem players), and deployment. 

Each stakeholder needs to understand their structural position in the ecosystem as this has implications for adhering to privacy regulations and policies. They suggest leveraging this framework and considering:

• Do you have a direct relationship with a user/ consumer?
• Are you dependent on an upstream party to access and deploy user data?
• Are you dependent on an upstream party to communicate with a user and to provide transparency into their data collection, use, and sharing practices?
• Are you reliant on sharing data with multiple parties to power their business needs?

Common themes were shared among all the stakeholders:

The use cases define the critical planning, activation, and measurement use cases where TV advertising may rely on consumer data, and fall into two broad categories: Planning and Activation, and Measurement.

Privacy Framework

The Privacy framework is designed to enable a stakeholder to analyze the durability of a solution for a use case by running each potential solution for each applicable use case by the stakeholder through several vectors.

The Privacy framework helps marketers determine whether, among other things, the data is personal or not, and the requirements and impacts on data collection, usage, and sharing for that specific use case, including user transparency and choice.

Solutions Framework

This framework provides a guide for identifying the solutions the marketer’s business uses for TV planning, activation, and measurement. Core solutions and techniques are defined and classified as existing, emerging, or enabling to reflect the level of industry adoption or enablement.

The Solutions framework is quite in-depth, and can be used to:

• • Map which solutions your business employs for each critical use case
  • Identify which dimensions your business needs to consider when evaluating the impact of platform policies and privacy compliance and any utility tradeoff
  • Explore alternative solutions for implementing critical use cases, if needed.

The report provides a thumbnail of existing and emerging privacy solutions, technologies, and techniques, as well as criteria for evaluating solutions.

Solutions Heatmap

After carefully considering the findings and reviewing the assessments, the report recommends that you can determine your business’s risk tolerance by using the heat maps in the report to guide your business initiatives and investments.

The solutions heatmap is a tool for evaluating solutions across utility, privacy durability, efficiency, and adoption. These dimensions can then be combined to create a unified “Viability Score” metric for weighing the privacy-utility tradeoff and industry considerations for each solution used. 

It’s a rather involved process that’s well worth the time to work through. Here’s an example of a heatmap: 

Final Advice

While this report serves as a valuable starting point, readers also have the option to collaborate with experts who can guide them in crafting a personalized privacy-focused strategy. By placing privacy at the forefront of planning, execution, and evaluation processes, brands can proactively address any potential disruptions with the assurance that they are both benefiting their business and enhancing the experience for customers.

Download the full report here.

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Due to its infancy, streamers need help to quantify these diverse audiences’ value and integrate them into the broader media ecosystem. The current state of measurement struggles to fully capture the significance of independent streamers, creating a need to establish common standards to support the “indie” ad marketplace.

At the CIMM Summit, industry experts Stuart Schwartzapfel, EVP, Media Partnerships at iSpot.TV;  Katya Shkolnik, Head of Partnerships at Future Today; Timothy Ware, Senior Vice President, Programmatic Sales and Partnerships, at Crackle; and Evan Bregman, General Manager, Streaming at Tastemade, discussed the need to address these challenges and the uphill battle publishers will face addressing consumer targeting in the independent streaming wars.

Will organizations like the IAB, the government, or entities like The Trade Desk establish industry standards to help mitigate the complexities? Whatever the solution, independent streamers need help connecting with their hyper-engaged audiences. 

Essence of Hyper-Engaged Audiences

In this age, viewers demand top-quality content that keeps them engaged, entertained, and glued to their screens. Various streaming platforms like YouTube have succeeded at this, providing better content that captures their audience’s attention. Advertisers can leverage such platforms to reach contextually relevant audiences. However, the downside is that the ecosystem needs more infrastructure to connect advertisers with these hyper-engaged audiences, and building this infrastructure will take time.

“…But right now, the ecosystem is not necessarily set up in such a way that you could find them,” said one of the Summit panelists.

The good news is that the potential for success is vast since advertisers are increasingly encouraged to invest in streaming alongside traditional linear TV. 

On the Birth of the Independent Streaming Alliance 

At the heart of the streaming revolution is the Independent Streaming Alliance, a collective of independent streamers determined to challenge the dominance of prominent players. The ISA’s genesis was rooted in shared concerns, fueling a collaborative effort to amplify the impact of independent streamers. Through strategic partnerships and joint initiatives, the ISA represents the collective strength of independent streaming platforms.

Bregman said that independent streamers are actively forging partnerships to bolster their presence in the market. Collaborations between various platforms, data providers, and advertisers are pivotal in building an efficient ecosystem. These partnerships enhance content offerings and facilitate knowledge exchange, helping participants stay ahead of industry trends and challenges.

Collaborations with measurement companies like ISPOT.TV enabled these streamers to gather invaluable data, including reach, impressions, and frequency. Their collaborative endeavors yielded a profound insight: independent streamers collectively reach approximately 15% of US TV households, indicating a substantial and engaged audience base.

Challenges in Measurement and Standardization

Despite their impressive reach, independent streamers encounter challenges in measurement and standardization. The absence of common standards hampers their seamless integration. Addressing issues related to ad pods, impressions, and metrics necessitates concerted efforts to establish foundational standards for measurement.

“So if we kind of put on the buyer hat, it’s vital to note that diversifying offerings of different publishers and supply are important to the brand,” said one of the panelists.

They pointed out the dominance of a handful of agencies, with a staggering 80 to 90% of revenue allocated among them. However, their anticipation rested on the paradigm shift expected among smaller, local brands. 

Independent streamers are pioneering innovative approaches, such as contextual relevance, to enhance the value proposition for advertisers. By offering transparent and detailed insights into their content metadata, these streamers provide advertisers with a clearer understanding of their offerings. Transparency ensures advertisers can make well-informed decisions when investing in independent streaming platforms.

Schwartzapfel asserts that achieving measurement standardization involves standardizing big data and set-top box data. Standardization ensures accurate targeting and personalization of ads and enhances ad effectiveness and monetization potential.

Ad Pods, Impressions, and the Future of Indie Streaming

While ad pods and impressions remain integral components of the discussion, the broader focus lies in unlocking the potential of independent streaming. Independent streamers can redefine the streaming landscape by emphasizing the value of partnerships, contextual relevance, and transparent measurement practices, paving the way for a diverse and thriving ecosystem.

“We’ve got advertisers who traditionally buy in linear. They’re being told by the likes of Paramount and others who have spoken today very eloquently, hey, you can buy streaming as well,” added one of the panelists.

Traditional linear TV buyers are adapting to purchasing streaming inventory, and digital buyers are venturing into the CTV space. However, challenges persist in the measurement and buying process, including inconsistent measurement metrics, attribution difficulties, and the need for inventory transparency. These challenges hinder effective decision-making and necessitate collaborative solutions.

Importance of Diversification in Offerings and Looking Ahead

Diversifying offerings is instrumental in expanding reach and engaging new audiences, strengthening the position of independent streamers in the industry. Diversification increases reach, captures niche markets, enhances revenue streams through various content formats like podcasts and on-demand videos, boosts user engagement, and ensures a competitive edge. Diversification is vital; different publishers and supply options are essential for brand success.

Independent streaming must rely on collaboration, innovation, and a collective commitment to overcoming challenges. As they continue to forge ahead, their collaborative initiatives and strategic partnerships drive the indie streaming industry toward a vibrant and prosperous future.

YouTube channels present an opportunity for advertisers to reach contextually relevant audiences. However, the lack of infrastructure to find these audiences and the absence of standardization in measurement pose setbacks. Forming partnerships and alliances among independent streamers is a positive stride toward measuring audience size, diversifying offerings, and bolstering a robust indie ad marketplace.

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But you’re probably asking yourself, “What on earth is TAXI?” Here’s a quick primer taken from the executive summary of CIMM and Ernst & Young’s report, which you can download for yourself here.

Stuffed Full of Content

• The volume of content has dramatically increased. The combined increases in the amount of commercial video content and the explosion of distribution channels and delivery platforms has led to a multiplier effect on overall content volume. As a result:
• Content owners are facing incredible difficulty monetizing their assets, and simply figuring out where and when they have been played.
• Advertisers are facing an increasingly inefficient cross-platform supply chain where matching their messages with quality content and audiences is becoming more difficult.

Tracking Slow to Catch Up

• Asset identification and tracking have not kept pace. Key business applications, technologies and supporting operational processes have not scaled commensurate with the content explosion. Fundamentals of trade between entities are still operating on models developed decades ago.
• Content owners are typically able to monetize a very small portion of their overall libraries due to today’s relatively high cost, but low relative return, associated with getting ad-supported long-tail assets in front of consumers.
• The lack of comparability of metrics across channels and platforms has led to confusion with advertisers and their agencies. It is difficult and time-consuming to evaluate ad performance across multiple platforms and channels. Real-time, in-flight campaign adjustments are, in effect, impossible, even though such a capability is highly desired by advertisers.
• Because it is costly and difficult to track content, licensing models have barely evolved despite the plethora of new content monetization opportunities and a commercial interest in doing so.
• The economic benefits of media workflow automation have not been realized because of the difficulty in passing asset-related information, including metadata, between systems that cannot cross-identify assets.
• Enormous, unnecessary cost is incurred across the content and advertising value chain because of duplicate, manual data entry and the constant necessity to map one asset identifier to another.
• The industry is clamoring for a simple, low-cost method for keeping track of content –both entertainment and advertising assets –and numerous schema have emerged, but the industry has yet to coalesce around a common methodology.

The Missing Metric

• The industry wants a way to track assets across platforms. The industry is ready. Executives with whom we spoke clearly articulated the need for trackable asset cross-platform identification(“TAXI”). We met with more than sixty executives from almost twenty entities across the content ecosystem, and were told over and over again that:
• TAXI is desired. The industry appears to have hit a tipping point and is ready for a consistent, open-standard approach to asset identification.
• TAXI is technically feasible.The combination of cloud computing and web services have made this realistic. It can be implemented and operated at a price-point that makes sense.
• TAXI is operationally feasible.Organizations have articulated a plethora of ways in which the TAXI concept would simplify content management and advertising operations, and reduce cycle time and associated costs.
• The industry is ready for TAXI now. The dramatic increase in the volume of content, combined with the pace of innovation around distribution platforms, devices and channels, has created the industry catalyst for the adoption of TAXI.

Essential Elements

• TAXI must address several practical requirements to be successful. There were several key attributes that industry constituents stated must be considered if the TAXI concept is to be adopted as a standard within our industry.
• Simple: TAXI must be easy to implement and operate. The less complex the better. Every entity with whom we spoke reinforced that each additional procedural, operational or technological change that has to be made will increase the barrierto a successful industry-wide TAXI adoption. Keeping it simple was the single most repeated critical success factor.
• Interoperable: Most participants in this study stated that if there was no prevalent asset identification methodology in use today, the TAXI vision would be most simply fulfilled with a single ID solution supported by domain-specific metadata. However, today’s media landscape includes several prevalent asset ID systems, and as such, it is critical that TAXI be designed so that these currently incompatible systems become fully interoperable, at a layer transparent to the people, processes and technologies involved in managing assets, and transmitting and exchanging asset-related information.
• Inextricably bound: Technology standards must be created so that IDs can be permanently linked to their associated assets without degrading quality.
• Extensible: TAXI must be capable of identifying multiple content types, versions and formats, and should be designed flexibly to accommodate emerging and future media asset types.
• Open and global: TAXI must be an open standard. It must be governed by registries accessible to all ecosystem participants and suppliers on a world-wide basis, and adhere to standards that M&E industry companies, including technology suppliers, can utilize across a global footprint.
• Cost effective: TAXI must be value driven –a low cost-barrier to adopt and operate, both in terms of direct costs (one-time implementation costs and ongoing fees paid to the TAXI registry or registries) and indirect costs (operational costs, including labor) to utilize TAXI as the volume of assets and their derivatives continues to climb.

Pushing Widespread Adoption

• The TAXI implementation is going to be an enormous industry undertaking.There were significant levels of interest exhibited during this study with an equal appreciation for the full complexity of the task ahead. For TAXI to work, a critical mass of industry participants all need to move forward at the same time in the same way. The industry will thus need a catalyst –a few committed major media companies who implement TAXI and demonstrate its value –to spark widespread concurrent adoption.
• Start by proving TAXI’s value to the C-Suite. The single most important stimulus for TAXI’s success will be demonstrating clear, quantifiable economic benefits that can be achieved in realistic timeframes at reasonable costs. Executives with whom we met stated that a well-publicized and successful “proof of concept” should be undertaken to demonstrate economic upside to CFOs within technical and operational investment parameters deemed feasible to CTOs. We have to prove that this is worth doing, and worth doing now.
• Take steps to attract critical mass before stepping too far. Because certain economic benefits will be achievable only when multiple parties across a given media sector supply-chain adopt TAXI, a phased implementation approach may be the best way to drive tangible business benefits that continuously outweigh implementation costs and “disruption” factors. A stepped approach will improve the likelihood of industry-wide adoption.
• Don’t forget to keep it simple. TAXI must be designed so that there are as few technical and operational barriers as possible. Make TAXI a “no brainer” and the industry will come.

Coming Out Party

TAXI is feasible… now take it to market!

Ernst & Young spoke with more than sixty executives from almost twenty M&E ecosystem companies who each possess a level of business, technical and/or operational depth in asset identification. It was relatively easy to get this group on board. It will be far more difficult to do so with their chiefs… those that will ultimately have to demand TAXI be deployed into the market. For the C-Suite, this must be a burning economic platform –one that has clear revenue growth and cost savings benefits.

Ernst & Young suggests CIMM consider the following steps to make influencing this C-level group easier, and to take TAXI from concept to execution:

1. Convene a cross-industry working group to develop technical specifications and agree to an asset identification and metadata schema for one or more pilots, along with an ID-to-asset binding technology. Develop data exchange and transmission standards for each use-case designed to be tested within the pilot(s). The identifier and associated technology and data exchange standards may be re-designed or enhanced pending the outcome of each pilot.
2. Design each pilot program to prove TAXI can deliver. Validate anticipated outcomes with participating C-suite executives, and gain commitment that if relevant results are demonstrated, that they will champion the TAXI vision to industry peers.
3. Recruit entities across the content production, distribution and advertising value chains to participate in one or more pilots with the goal of proving a combination of revenue opportunities and tangible reductions in overhead costs. Cite tangible, quantifiable benefits that are achievable with TAXI.
4. Highly publicize the results through the publication of a “white paper” and/or presentation in a widely-attended press event or conference.
5. Initiate a phased approach to implementing the TAXI concept so that ecosystem players’ benefits continually outweigh the amount of disruption incurred. And keep it simple.

Pondering the future of TV and digital video? OPS TV will bring digital advertising leaders and ops professionals together to discuss the intersection of digital video and TV advertising. Register today for OPS TV, which will be held July 11, 2012, in New York.

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