TV And Digital Don't Mesh Yet; BuzzFeed Can't Measure It's Whole Audience

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Ugly, But It Works?

TV and digital are coming together, but progress is piecemeal. Last week Rentrak brought two large TV broadcasters, Sinclair and Tribune, into a new unwired ad measurement and distribution marketplace.“We are proceeding cautiously, but we think there is an opportunity to try doing things differently,” said Sinclair TV Group VP Steven Pruett to MediaPost’s Joe Mandese. Elsewhere: Fox Networks advanced advertising Prez Joe Marchese said TV’s quality is undervalued by bastardized cross-channel metrics. “We can complain all we want about Nielsen, but it’s fair. Digitally, one impression could be half the page for two seconds, another could be for 10 seconds. Because it doesn’t have any standard … we’re getting crushed.”

Patchwork Metrics

BuzzFeed has embraced the “platform publishing” craze like no other company, and as a result it says available estimates of its audience size (comScore, Adobe and Google Analytics) are way low. Publisher Dao Nguyen argues in a blog post that the site’s true audience is about five times higher than comScore’s estimate of 80 million. “UVs (unique visitors) as they are currently reported are decreasingly relevant to BuzzFeed. … Internal UV numbers only measure unique browsers of our website, mobile apps and Facebook Instant Articles.” She says comScore adds desktop viewers on YouTube, but still leaves out mobile YouTube activity, non-US users and video consumption on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and other places. More.

Losing To The Long Tail

Deployment of ad-blocking software has grown 41% over the past year, with 198 million active users worldwide. Brand-name publishers are struggling to come up with an answer. Forbes and other major US publishers have just begun hacking those first trails in the ad block jungle. “The majority of people blocking ads on our site were doing it because other sites were irritating them,” said Ars Technica editor-in-chief Ken Fisher in a deep dive on the topic by The New York Times. “It’s the worst players in the web publishing world that’s driving this.” More.

Apple’s Brand Of Privacy

The standoff between Apple and the US government has nothing to do with advertising-related data collection, but it does show how privacy as a broad concept has become key to the company’s brand proposition. Not for the first time, CEO Tim Cook appealed directly to Apple’s customers last week, echoing earlier statements about the company’s role as protector of its customers’ information. “Tim Cook is leveraging his personal brand and Apple’s to stand on the side of consumer privacy,” University of Buffalo law prof Mark Bartholomew told the Times. Earlier in AdExchanger: Apple on data collection.

But Wait, There’s More!