At iSpot’s annual TV Disrupt event, iSpot CEO & Founder Sean Muller addressed cross-platform advertising’s biggest challenges head-on, outlining innovative measurement solutions to continue to correct the industry’s course amid the headwinds of fragmentation. The iSpot vision hinged on the need for advertisers to unify ad measurement across creative, audience, and outcomes, in order to elevate performance and drive ROAS while tackling the complexities of today’s media landscape.
Addressing Industry Challenges
With constant fluctuations in the marketplace, iSpot remains laser-focused on solving problems for hundreds of brand customers and the industry at large. Muller honed in on four key challenges as he opened the day’s discourse on all things measurement.
1. Creative and Media Divides: Creative quality plays a crucial role in media success, but there is a growing disconnect between creative and media teams, and the data they use, that results in missed opportunities to optimize performance throughout the entirety of the ad lifecycle.
2. Rapidly Fragmenting Audiences: From shifting viewer behaviors to a complex array of platforms and walled gardens, reaching the right audience with the right message, and measuring efficacy, is harder than ever.
3. Complicated Outcomes Measurement: Layered on top of creative and audience complexities, advertisers lack easy, fast and reliable ways to measure the bottom-funnel impact of their ad campaigns.
4. Growing Identity Crisis: With growing privacy regulations and uncertainty around the future of identity, advertisers are faced with more ad targeting and measurement hurdles.
Unifying Ad-First Innovation Across Creative, Audience, and Outcome Measurement
At the heart of solving these challenges, Muller underscored the importance of having an ad-first measurement approach that seamlessly spans across creative, audience, and outcomes.
To bridge the disconnect between creative and media teams, Muller emphasized how iSpot solutions enable advertisers to seamlessly integrate creative strategies with media execution, leading to greater overall effectiveness. By democratizing the data that informs everything from purchase intent to audience reach to attribution, a unified measurement approach gives creative and media teams the ability to operate from the same playbook.
But unification doesn’t stop there. Muller detailed how standardizing ad-first metrics across streaming and linear is paramount for overcoming audience fragmentation, and getting a clear picture of incrementality and unique reach. He zeroed in on the four killer KPIs every cross-platform advertiser needs to have in their measurement tool kit: verified impressions, co-viewing, reach and frequency, and unique audiences.
He also advocated for simplified outcome metrics; such as sales lift and incremental sales, speaking to the industry’s need for more reliable, streamlined, and affordable methods for measuring the real-world impact of ads.
As Muller noted, for unification to work and to ensure the measurement is representative, accurate and reliable, next-gen identity and big data systems are required.
With growing privacy regulations and increased scrutiny on the data companies have access to, identity and its impact on ad activation and measurement is top of mind for advertisers. Muller addressed these concerns by outlining how iSpot is taking major steps forward in data management, aiming to improve audience matching and outcome attribution through representative and privacy-compliant household mapping and AI-enhanced data modeling. The advancements will enhance iSpot’s existing person-level and advanced audience measurement capabilities, giving advertisers accurate and comprehensive assessment of how effective they are at reaching target audiences.
To truly understand the depth of these measurement innovations and how they can transform your cross-platform ad strategies, watch Sean Muller’s full TV Disrupt session on-demand.