In an Australian first, Nine Entertainment Co is introducing a ground-breaking new reporting tool, Platform Agnostic Ratings for Content (PARC), to provide clients and agencies with a metric for measuring media consumption of content across platforms.
Peter Wiltshire, group sales and marketing director Nine Entertainment Co, said: “As content is increasingly consumed across multiple touch points we need to measure audiences across the entire life cycle of the content journey – live broadcast, encores, playback, and online long and short-form.
“As a cross-platform media owner we have wanted this data for quite a while, and our agency partners have been crying out for it. PARC is the solution we have built while we wait for an industry-delivered currency.
“This is the first step in Nine Entertainment Co. being able to measure cross-platform consumption for our partners and sponsors across our major pieces of content. We are already in-market with the second season of The Block, selling audience delivery using this new calculation.”
Any attempt to measure audiences across the spectrum of platforms requires the underlying measurement unit to be conceptually identical. The current method of quoting stream starts as a metric of measuring long-form video is in no way reflective of how TV is measured. PARC addresses this by averaging audience volumes at every moment of the online stream, rather than just focusing on the stream start, effectively mimicking a TV rating. A video stream with an average audience of 20,000-30,000 usually has stream starts in excess of 100,000.
Adding the de-duplicated audience of a piece of content watched either live, or via playback or encores to the online video metric creates a Total Viewer Exposure number. This number captures the total audience regardless of screen or platform.
Using House Husbands as an example, the audience for the 2014 season based on overnight ratings was 889,622, the number generally quoted when reporting program performance. Using PARC, the Total Viewer Exposure number for House Husbands increases by 43 per cent to 1.27 million across all screens.
Steve Weaver, group director research and analytics for Nine Entertainment Co, said: “While not a trading currency, PARC will help to close the current gap in understanding how our audiences are consuming content, and the brands who partner with this content.
“NEC will transition to OzTAM’s official cross-platform metric once it is available, because an official trading currency panel across all content platforms should be the ultimate objective for us all.”
Source: Nine Entertainment Co