Dive Brief:

• According to Ad Age, the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) is giving digital views their due. The TV trade group is recommending average audience as a standard for comparing traditional and digital platforms.
• The standard recommendation comes after years of the group downplaying the numbers cited for digital views.
• Adam Gerber, senior vp-client development and communications for ABC, told Ad Age, "This is how TV has been evaluated for decades. It the only fair way to make comparisons across channels."

Dive Insight:

For marketers, anything that standardizes measurement across disparate channels such as traditional TV and digital video platforms offers a welcome element of clarity and transparency for spending. It also serves to help in making decisions on where an audience is best reached.

The VAB average audience standards uses measurements that apply across media and are available to comScore and Nielsen subscribers, including unique audience, average minutes per visitor and total minutes. The metric is calculated by multiplying the unique audience by average minutes and dividing that by the total minutes in the considered time period. The VAB provided an example that the number of people watching, or on a platform, in an average minute is more relevant than the number of video streams of unspecified duration.

Yahoo’s streaming live cast of an NFL game this past season prompted the VAB to research the topic because although Yahoo claimed 15.2 million unique viewers of the game, TV metrics applied to the live cast translated to 2.4 million viewers.

The move by the VAB is a fairly clear signal that TV no longer stands apart from the rest of the different ways people engage with video content. Digital now has a seat at the grown-up table.