The Golden Age of Measurement (Cannes 2022)

Currency multiplication

Navin says currency proliferation will work for advertisers.

“It’s going to present an amazing amount of business outcomes if measured correctly and driven correctly,” he says.

“And so for every category and for every vertical, there’s going to be a currency that makes sense for that client, including the client’s own first-party data.”

Multiple currencies plus the rich engagement of a medium like TV add up to a “best of both worlds”, Navin says.

But, around the industry, people are expressing weariness that, to leverage the targeting, measuring and frequency-capping power of connected TV, they are having to do it across a fragmented range of options, to piece together the pieces into a whole-market campaign solution.

For Samba TV’s Navin, however, it is an inevitability.

“(The) fact is that our lives have changed,” he says. “We’re coming out of a pandemic. What was truthful in the 1950s and the 20th century, about the fact that we were all gathered around one screen every night at prime time, is (a) pretty far cry from reality today.

“We’re watching video on many screens, including long-form television and movies. And then we’ve got movie theatres who basically said ‘we’re not open’.

“(Nielsen) were able to maintain a currency for a long time.

“We really need to think about what is the next-generation currency, what’s going to replicate the stability that Nielsen had for 70 years in its first-party data?”