Origin is not intended as a rival currency to Barb and there is no use-case for the cross-media measurement solution that involves trading. Origin, which is the UK execution of the WFA’s Halo framework, is intended as a tool for campaign planning, reporting and evaluation only. Phil Smith, Director General at ISBA, which represents brand owners advertising in the UK and manages Origin, made this clear at The Future of Media London in October as he addressed concerns about the powerful initiative which next year moves from beta into full v1 product launch.
“Our data is not intended to be used in direct conflict with Barb. We have talked about de-duplicated reach and frequency in television across platforms and the need for a very rich source of data to enable better econometrics. Those are the kinds of use cases that do not conflict. We always designed Origin to be compatible with the existing currency [Barb] and we are in ongoing discussions about being able to ingest Barb data alongside Origin. We know that quite a number of media agencies want to see the Barb data [inside Origin] and there is a considerable amount of discussion around this.”
Barb and Origin are in a standoff over the base metric for reach that is used within Origin. Barb’s Chief Executive, Justin Sampson, outlined his concerns in The Media Leader recently, saying that “while ISBA says Origin will report to the MRC cross-media standard, it is also including all commercial impressions”. He worries that advertisers will have to blend video impressions that meet the MRC viewability standard with others that fail to meet the threshold.
Sampson said in the article: “Barb has been consistently ready to let our data be used alongside other sources of online video data that adhere to the MRC cross-media standard.”
At The Future of Media London, Smith countered that “fair and objective measures are critical to Origin, and we have built in MRC’s two-seconds [duration threshold] as the default standard when it comes to video reporting.”
Addressing concerns that Origin will be comparing apples with pears, Smith declared: “All kinds of planning systems are being used currently with very non-transparent use of apples v pears comparisons. We are building in a level of transparency into a granularity of reporting that will allow people to make judgements on the value that comes from high attention media with high completion rates versus media with lower figures.
“In the Origin system, at beta, we have MRC’s two-seconds as standard. There will be completed views for linear television and YouTube, and you will see custom metrics for completed views.” Smith says advertisers want second-by-second granularity to feed into their analytics systems.
The ISBA Director General reiterated the fundamentals of why advertisers support Origin. “We have media consumption that is massively fragmented and a media experience that is more variegated by the day, and today we either have siloed accountable reporting or we have siloed unaccountable reporting or we have cross-media measurement that is very much not accountable and not available for inspection.”
He stressed that it is the advertising community in the UK that is driving the cross-media measurement initiative.
Origin is leading the way with the implementation of the Halo framework, which will also be used in the USA under the auspices of Aquila (ultimately managed by ANA). The purpose is to give advertisers a measurement solution that shows unified reach and frequency across different media such as television, digital video and digital display (including in social media) with de-duplication.
The beta trial is now providing live campaign data, with 35 of the largest UK advertisers participating. Smith noted that the first set of reporting “is all about de-duplicating reach and frequency.” He outlined the Origin roadmap for progressive improvements and this includes increased reporting features around more demos and the involvement of more advertisers ahead of the open product launch.
The precise date for Origin v1 product release is still to be determined but in September the organisation predicted Q1 2025.
Origin is using a 2,500-household, single-source representative people panel (managed by Kantar Media) to calibrate a virtual panel of televisions that will feed viewing exposure data to the Origin platform. During late 2023 and the first half of this year, ACR data from Samba TV sets was integrated to capture viewing behaviour across broadcast linear TV, BVOD, SVOD and other connected TV sources.
Samba TV sets in the people panel homes were monitored to understand what key audiences watch, with Kantar Media using that knowledge to create personification models that can be applied to ACR data from up to one million TV sets in the UK. Comscore is tasked with managing the production flow of ACR data and Origin has made it clear that it will consider using other large-scale TV data sources as well.
Photo shows Phil Smith, Director General, ISBA.
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If you are interested in people panels being used to calibrate large-scale virtual panels, read our story about the new Teletest 2.0 measurement system in Austria, which is now being used as the TV currency.
Austria revolutionizes its TV measurement and currency with synthetic panel, using HbbTV RPD
