Dish and Sling TV are joining Comscore’s cross-platform measurement solution in beta, their parent company, Dish Media, said Thursday.
Dish Media is the first multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) to join the Campaign Ratings pilot program, which launched in September. Campaign Ratings is designed to be a cross-platform metric that can be tracked across linear, desktop, mobile and OTT.
With Dish Media on board, advertisers can measure addressable and linear ads on the company’s platforms, starting with Sling TV and adding Dish in early 2019.
“This will provide person-level reach on Sling and Dish platforms,” Dish Media SVP Kevin Arrix told AdExchanger. “To be able to identify duplicated reach is really important to us. To provide co-viewing insights for addressable is really important as well.”
Campaign Ratings grew out of the industry’s frustration with fragmented viewing and measurement. If an advertiser is running ads on linear and OTT video, it’s difficult for them to know which households they’re reaching and if they’re reaching a specific audience effectively.
Thus, Campaign Ratings is designed to make TV measurement more like digital.
“We shouldn’t be saying ‘TV’ and ‘digital video’ – we should just be saying convergent TV,” Comscore president Sarah Hofstetter told AdExchanger. “Right now, we’re looking at them separately, and we’re measuring them separately. We need to look at efficacy of advertising in totality.”
ABC, CBS, CNN, Disney, Fox, Freeform, NBCUniversal, The CW Network, Turner, Viacom, Hulu and WPP’s media buying arm GroupM signed on to test Campaign Ratings before it launched in beta. Future iterations of Campaign Ratings will have the ability to perform “advanced targeting,” Comscore CEO Bryan Wiener previously told AdExchanger.
Other companies have attempted to create a unified metric for video consumption, so far without luck. Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings metric, for example, faced a fair amount of criticism, namely from NBCU’s chairman of advertising and client partnerships, Linda Yaccarino.
