One of the truest lines in the Hulu Fyre documentary came from Mic’s Jake Horowitz, who noted, “As it turns out, it doesn't take much to trick a New York City media reporter into writing a story about how great your company is.”
If you think Horowitz is exaggerating, ask yourself why John Landgraf, the outspoken CEO of FX Network, has been getting so much press for noting that Netflix’s new viewer numbers are just another case of “grading your own homework syndrome.”
While Landgraf should be lauded for pointing this out, the bigger question is: Why it was necessary for him to do so? Why isn’t the media doing its job?
As someone whose livelihood is based on understanding trends in the media industry, I may be more sensitive to this than most, but it’s an issue we bump into at TVREV all the time, and it’s why I’ve become so cautious about actually citing any sort of media industry stats without first investigating their provenance.
In so many cases, those stats are either self-reported or (worse still) based on a specious study or a casually tossed-off “analyst projection” that gets repeated, retweeted and reprinted enough times that it seems to become a “fact” and no one questions or remembers where it came from.
At times, the leaps of faith are mindboggling.
As numerous journalists familiar with the industry reported last week (raises hand), a “study” claiming that 60% of viewers had already cut the cord and left pay TV was unblinkingly reprinted by over a half-dozen mainstream publications (including two that, to their credit, removed the story within 24 hours).
The stats themselves were fairly unbelievable—while cord-cutting is indeed on the rise, close to 80% of American households still have a pay TV subscription, a number that’s readily verifiable, given that pay-TV providers are public companies that report their subscriber numbers quarterly.
But the real kicker was that the “study” wasn’t an actual study at all but rather a PR tactic employed by an SEO marketing firm on behalf of one of its clients, and the person credited as the author of the study is listed as “creative director” on the company's website.
None of which was all that difficult to figure out.
We Need A Common Standard
While the problem of specious research, self-reported statistics and fantasy-based analyst projections is probably unsolvable given the pressure on many publications to generate clicks, the notion of establishing a standard metric to measure TV is not. It’s something that’s been discussed and debated for many years now, ever since media outlets began blindly trumpeting the news that Facebook had a billion “video views” per month without ever pausing to reflect on the fact that Facebook, which was also grading its own homework, considered three seconds with the sound off to be a “view” and that if TV were measured by the same standards, TV “views” would be in the tens of billions.
Beware “The Flixcopalypse”
The impending “Flixcopalypse”—the launch of four new supersized streaming OTT services from Disney, Warner, Apple and NBCU—makes standardized measurement even more important, especially because many of those new services will also be selling advertising.
The confusion around measurement makes the entire OTT ecosystem a giant puzzle for marketers, and the fear is that the end result will be to drive them away from OTT.
That’s unfortunate because with over $15 billion being spent on original programming, there are going to be a whole lot of people watching. But from a marketer’s perspective, how do you determine a fair price for OTT ad slots, and how do you compare one service with another without a common standard? The easier choice is often to just stay away.
Further complicating matters is that there’s no clear consensus on what marketers and their agencies would like to see measured. In talking with numerous executives for a recent study we’re conducting, I found that there were pockets of support for sticking with the traditional GRP model, for switching to a less time-based “impressions” model, for using a combination of the two, and for abandoning them both completely in favor of something known as “multitouch attribution” or “business results”—an algorithm-based system that tracks consumers' journeys through the sales funnel and lets marketers know which commercials, running on which platforms, at which times, in front of which viewers, have been the most successful.
While multitouch attribution is a great tool for advertisers and marketers, the programming and promotions teams are excited by the rapid growth of a measurement tool known as automated content recognition, or ACR. By measuring only what is “on the glass” (e.g, being watched on the TV set), ACR vendors are able to track what viewers are watching at any given moment, regardless of source, and when used in conjunction with panels and set-top box data, that can provide a clearer picture of overall viewership on OTT.
While Netflix currently does not allow ACR vendors to track its programming and doesn’t need to worry about pleasing advertisers, the fact that it’s touting viewership numbers at all would seem to indicate an awareness that at least four of its competitors are likely to feature advertising and thus will be promoting their own numbers to advertisers. It also seems aware that all seven of its competitors will likely be sharing their own viewership numbers with the media in order to make it seem as if their programming is the most popular. (It’s a powerful marketing tool.)
Many in the mainstream media community will, of course, repeat these numbers without question. Entertainment industry stories make good headlines and garner lots of clicks, and the audience often isn’t familiar enough with the inner workings of the TV industry to call them out.
All the more reason we need to arrive at a standard before the self-aggrandizing ripple becomes an unstoppable wave.
