Channel 4, Sky and ITV have joined forces to launch a collaborative TV measurement panel designed to allow advertisers to measure TV’s impact on campaigns.

Speaking at a Thinkbox event yesterday (11 September), the three broadcasters revealed a proof of concept for a “cross-broadcaster multi-outcome panel” called Lantern which they claim to be a “total TV answer”.

“By collaborating on the multi-outcome measurement panel, we can give [TV] the measurement it deserves,” Sameer Modha, measurement innovation lead, commercial, ITV said.

The tool aims to demonstrate TV’s impact on long-term brand building and short-term performance metrics such as search queries, web traffic, social media engagement, and conversion.

According to the firms, it can provide insights into categories at a brand or campaign level and assess the impact of different audiences.

“We can bring in variables such as category and brand campaign level, and then we can look at the impact of different audiences and campaign shapes and sizes, and then bring in new measurement metrics such as lift and change in share,” Channel 4’s head of sales Victoria Appleby explained.

Additionally, Appleby claimed the tool can provide insights which are currently “too granular” for techniques such as media mix navigator (MMN) to measure.

Sky Media’s director of client and marketing, Karin Seymour, said the tool aims to answer the question: ‘Did my TV campaign work?’

Collaboration

By collaborating on the project, Seymour said they are better positioned to tackle any potential challenges.

“All the challenges make it only more important we do collaborate, but what we will do is shoulder the burden together and face into those challenges so we make this a success,” she said.

Seymour claimed the benefits of working together mean a bigger pool of advertisers and campaigns, streamlined reporting, cost-sharing and the ability to “glean” industry and category benchmarks.

Appleby said there is currently no panel that “credibly identifies” who’s been exposed to TV advertising across all the major broadcasters and can be used to match the advertising exposures with subsequent online behaviours.

“It’s a broadcaster panel made up of normal consumers balanced to reflect the UK population,” she said.”In a media ecosystem where the advertising world is very complex, the broadcaster panel can help us identify a range of different behaviours that result from the advertising exposure.”

The announcement comes ahead of ISBA’s next phase of its cross-media measurement tool, Origin.

ISBA’s Origin Project has been in the works for four years, with the next stage of the trial set to launch later this year. However, the project has been criticised by certain quarters, particularly traditional broadcast TV providers.

“We’ve been having very constructive conversations with Origin over the last few years,” Kelly Williams, managing director, commercial, ITV said in an earlier panel. “But the way they are developing Origin, we’ve got a few issues with.”

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He outlined two “thorny” issues TV broadcasters currently have with Origin. The first is its inability to measure “apples with apples”.

“At the moment, Origin is proposing that you can pair a completed view on television with a two-second view on YouTube, and for us, that just doesn’t feel right,” he said.

Secondly, Kelly claimed that Origin is proposing that broadcasters “wouldn’t get access to the data that comes out the other end”.

“We feel that we should be able to see the value TV brings overall.”

However, he said that if those issues were solved, they could make some “real progress”.

How it works

Modha explained they have been working on the groundwork for the proof of concept for four months in collaboration with data company Measure Protocol.

He claimed the tool will use Measure Protocol’s behavioural panel, which has back data of TV ads and cross-references them with people’s online behaviours.

“They’ve got two to three years worth of historical data, so all we have to do is ask those people what TVs they have,” he said.

“That is where the power of this collaboration really lands, because then we can go to the 4 million sky panel users, and we can reach into those enormous data sets and pull out the historical TV records for the people that match the panel that we’re working with.”

The TV providers are now calling on advertisers to volunteer to participate in the first stage before announcing the proof of concept results at Christmas.