Hershey, Tyson, Meredith join new initiative to elevate ad measurement standards

Dive Brief:

Thunder Experience Cloud, a people-based ad-serving platform, announced Truth in Measurement (TIM), a new industry group that plans to develop a technical standard for sharing and measuring advertising data that promotes transparency and protects consumer privacy and publisher data, according to a press release shared with Marketing Dive.
The new initiative will be led by executives from major brands and ad platforms, including Vincent Rinaldi, head of addressable media at Hershey; Trace Rutland, director of media innovation at Tyson Foods; and Alysia Borsa, chief data officer at Meredith.
TIM will work to improve the lack of transparency when advertising with publishers, who provide advertisers with little or no data because they fear data breaches will compromise consumer privacy and their own audience data. This has made it difficult for advertisers to measure their ads and verify results. TIM will create a framework for providing ad exposure measurement tied to anonymized IDs for measurement.

Dive Insight:

The marketing industry continues to wrangle with transparency and data privacy, issues that have been amplified in the past year following high-profile privacy breaches, like Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal. The new TIM initiative aims to focus on enabling people-based measurement, rather than channel-specific measurement. The latter has been the industry's focus, according to Thunder Experience Cloud, resulting in a lack of attention paid to people-based measurement, which refers to tracking ad exposure and conversion by person across channels, which can help marketers understand the true ROI of their campaigns.

The involvement of major brands, like Hershey, Tyson and Meredith, underscores the importance that marketers are placing on transparency and could encourage other brands to work to improve their methods to bolster consumer trust. Being more proactive and championing customer data privacy and using it to differentiate brands is one of Forrester's predictions for CMOs in 2019. The report also predicted that CMOs would promote their focus on customer data as part of their business models or as a selling point.

With the vast amounts of customer and other data that markers collect, many struggle to determine their marketing performance, leading to missed growth opportunities. Forty percent use ROI measurement methods based on short-term sales, while 85% say blending short- and long-term measures is the best approach for determining ROI, according to Kantar research. Fewer than 20% of agencies and media say they are confident and less than half of advertisers are sure of their ability to create insights from data, and 78% find it difficult to determine performance across channels.

TIM follows several other marketing industry initiatives aimed at improving digital marketing. In October, video marketplace Unruly announced a new brand and agency-powered council, called U7, that will focus on the health of the industry and cleaning up digital marketing. U7 is made up of 10 major advertisers, including Nestle, Unilever, Diageo, Samsung, American Express, L'Oreal, GSK, The Wall Street Journal and Mars.

During Advertising Week 2018, a beta version of the new industry standard Data Transparency Label was unveiled to help marketers and agencies more responsibly leverage data and deliver more relevant messages to consumers. The label, designed to look like a nutritional label, was created by the ANA's Data Marketing & Analytics division, IAB Tech Lab, Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement and the Advertising Research Foundation. It discloses source, collection, segmentation criteria, recency and cleansing specifics for audience segment data. The group was also planning to create a centralized database to house the information and a compliance program.