The Advertising Club Bangalore recently held its inaugural edition of the ‘Knowledge Conclave – Driving Growth Through the New Era of Measurement’. C-Suite SME speakers from different spaces of the data-tech world spoke and interacted on some of today’s most important topics.
Sandipan Mondal, Founder & CEO Zapr Media Labs spoke on ‘Next-gen tech for real-time measurement’.
Sandipan delved on the multiple challenges today’s complex media environment throws and the inability of the current measurement systems to cope with them –Data not available real time at scale, despite passive viewing (85% using phones while watching TV) no capture of attentiveness, no city / hyper-local heterogeneity capture, no integrated TV & digital measurement, inability to attribute purchases to all media exposure across full funnel and more.
Sandipan said that the ideal media measurement system doesn’t exist, but if we start thinking through all the gaps &solve them – we could do better.He shared next gen tech that resolves some of these gaps.
The first is for building Integrated Single-Source Panels. Large panels capturing media consumption from smartphones to TV, PCs and tablets & capturing purchase behavior metrics. ACR (automated content recognition) tech can match offline media for TV and radio. OTT consumption can be tracked through SDK. With integration on panelists phones, content viewed on paywall OTTs like Netflix or Amazon Prime can also be tracked, including time-spent & viewing habits across individual platforms. By panelist bill scanning and personalized smartphone surveys data consideration & purchase can be captured.
Another tech solution is tracking viewership through Smart TV/Set top box logs. Smart TVs now available at rock-bottom prices will transform the TV landscape, just as smart-phones changed the play for feature-phones. Integrating video and audio ACR tech directly into smart TVs will generate real-time comprehensive second-by-second consumption data of both linear TV and OTT. This technology being scalable will let us get data from millions of people and help track at a significantly more granular level.
The third technology Sandipan shared was of Eyeball Tracking. This technology is being deployed to track audience numbers and attentiveness without manual intervention. Using eyeball tracking technology on a select panel, content creators can measure attentiveness and understand whether people are actually watching the content or not.
The fourth technology was ofAI powered in-stream virtual branding. Today product placement happens before production. But the future is about using AI and computer vision, for ad/product placement beyond ad breaks. Frame by frame computer vision analysis will help decide which videos to drive in-stream and where the placement should happen.
Zapr Media Labs Zapr through ACR tech embedded in users’ smartphones, has created world’s largest offline media consumption repository (150 mn+ profiled users/ 80+ partner apps/ 500+ channels/ 10,000+ TVCs every month). With this scale, Zapr can uniquely provide granular geo-level data across the country. After TV and cinema, Zapr has ventured into tracking OTT consumption, creating holistic user profiles through media consumption data across all channels of content consumption.They are leveraging computer vision technology to build in-stream ad placement product. An AI-based media plan optimizer is being developed to create optimal, cross-media integrated media plans. So proof of concept already exists for many of the next-gen tech Sandipan shared for real-time measurement.
Sanchayeeta Verma, Chairperson Knowledge Conclave 2019 said, “In our era of connected platforms, big data signals are being generated and data-driven tech are enabling businesses to harness them. The conclave helped understand how to do this and join the dots between the tech world and the world our brands play in”.
“Knowledge Conclave will now be part of our annual program. Watch out for the 2020 edition“ said Advertising Club Bangalore Executive Director, Arvind Kumar.
