Video Analytics: Here’s What Major Media & Entertainment Brands Use for Better Insights
How do you measure total viewership of the most-watched broadcast in the world?
If you’re NBC, you use both video analytics and traditional digital analytics to create a “total audience delivery” headcount across broadcast, cable, and streaming devices. This is exactly what NBC did for the most recent Olympic games, reports the New York Times.
While most media and entertainment companies will never enjoy the same audience size or tentpole reach as the Olympics, all of them are dealing with similar multi device video measurement challenges — so much so that these same companies often settle for a “somewhat” accurate portrayal of their total audience reach across devices.
There is a better way, however. Companies such as NBC, Disney, ESPN, Fox, CBS, ABC, Dish Network, and over 1,000 other media and entertainment companies use Adobe Analytics for Video to automate and streamline the sharing of video data in real time to gain more insights into their audiences. In fact, three out of every four U.S. broadcast networks use Adobe Analytics for Video — so do five out of the six top pay TV operators, 80 percent of the top 10 entertainment companies in America, and 60 percent of the world’s 10 largest media companies.
Why? Because in the words of NBC Sports’ Dan Lovinger, “Advertisers now recognize that a viewer is a viewer.” But you can’t monetize those viewers with sponsorships and advertising unless you can count them, which explains why a growing number of traditional analytics users are now upgrading to and reaching for Adobe Analytics Cloud.
For example, many of the above are using video analytics to understand how cord-cutting and cord-never households are engaging with video and streaming content. They use it to understand how digital is growing. In the case of NBC, the iconic broadcaster recently learned that digital viewers grew 30 percent, to over 100 million since the previous Olympic Games.
Major media also are using Analytics Cloud to better inform their programming, further target their ad placements, or, in the case of Fox Sports, meet their Super Bowl sponsorship agreements. With Federated Analytics from Adobe, media and entertainment brands can automate and streamline the sharing of video data in real time, sending it to the right people in standardized formats.
Those sharing the data are able to control how it will be shared during each video playback, down to the level of individual videos. Those receiving the data can specify where it should be sent (a specified report suite), based on defined triggers.
To use another example, news outlets such as USA Today and The Washington Post share their urgent news stories with videos to distributors on the web, including MSN, Facebook, Twitter, and others. Through Federated Analytics, news outlets can request that these distributors share their data for understanding true story performance.
Obviously, this standardized measurement certainly helps matters. But how do content providers account for all those video views that they don’t have control over or can’t tag? Federated Analytics provides that answer as well and allows seamless, private data flows between partners. The partnership allows programmers (receivers) to federate data from operators (sharers) that are mutual Adobe Analytics for Video clients.
That way, programmers can monitor their video viewing behaviors and work with distributors to eliminate extra tagging, benefit from additional measurement, and do so from a single user interface. Call it 21st-century TV show ratings.
Here’s how it works:
- You must be an Adobe Analytics for Video customer on both the sharing and receiving ends.
- Both customers must agree on the set of data that is to be shared and sign an agreement.
- Adobe will work with the customer to set up their reporting suite to ingest the additional video data.
- Adobe turns on the data flow once the above steps have been completed.
- The receiver confirms that the data is coming through as expected and these video streams are combined with other shared reporting data for a holistic view of their video consumption.
With those steps in place, Federated Analytics can begin to help customers collect all of the pieces of the distribution puzzle for a complete ratings picture by eliminating data silos, manually matching and reporting data from numerous sources, and measuring coverage across all major devices with video, including over-the-top, set-top boxes, and gaming consoles. Furthermore, Federated Analytics can lighten the ingestion load, monetize new segments, and make better programming decisions in light of newly emergent providers, skinny bundles, and low brand loyalty.
Adobe Audience Manager also provides meaningful opportunities for brands looking to activate, monetize, and gain further insight about their audience. Within Audience Manager, brands can prioritize and target the distributor with the most relevant video views via the robust real-time integrations offered for audience activation. Brands can also elect to exchange video data with interested advertisers or partners to assist with monetization or data sharing in a transparent, agnostic, and self-service environment.
Furthermore, by leveraging Audience Analytics, brands can benefit from a bidirectional flow of data between Analytics and Audience Manager to share segments of audience characteristics or exposure and delivery data. And if the clients are participating in the Adobe Experience Cloud Device Co-Op, they can de-duplicate audience count using people metrics to see a distinct count of viewers across devices.
That’s probably more mumbo-jumbo than you care to know. The point is that the world’s biggest media companies are using Adobe Analytics Federated Analytics because they accurately count viewers across all devices where traditional estimations fail.
Maybe you didn’t know what video analytics are capable of? Maybe you didn’t know that Adobe even provided them? Whatever the case, Analytics Cloud is at the center of video engagement, and it’s a new, fresh, and modern way of approaching video viewership and monetization.