Total Audience Delivery (TAD), The True Measurement Standard
By Ryan Dastrup and Ricard Jensen
As the ways in which people consume televised sports continues to rapidly evolve, there’s been an ongoing debate about the best way to effectively capture the number of people who are watching in all kinds of ways.
NBC Universal recently announced some bold initiatives they are taking to try to account for all the people viewing the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in different ways using a concept they call Total Audience Delivery, and we think it’s worth discussing.
The concept is simple and elegant. Total Audience Delivery (TAD) combines views on linear broadcast and cable channels along with mobile (cell phones), tablets, and connected TVs. It also measures viewership across broadcast and cable TV, as well as social and digital media with the goal of delivering advertisers a single viewer. NBC debuted the metric for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics after the linear TV audience for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics fell by 21 percent compared to the 2012 London Games; because of technological changes more people were streaming and watching in other ways the live tv audience shrunk.
Part of the reason for measuring the total audience is to account for growing number of cord-cutters; that largely younger demographic that has unsubscribed from cable TV and watches sports from such streaming services as ESPN+, Fox Sports Go, and DAZN (among many others). In order to measure the total number of streaming viewers, NBC Universal recently launched CFlight which will assimilate live streaming and video on-demand data from Nielsen, Comcast, and Moat.
Another innovation NBC recently announced for the Tokyo Olympics is a partnership with Twitter. NBC will sell ads on Twitter during the Olympics and Twitter will broadcast daily live shows, highlights and polls. This partnership is only available in the United States.
What does this mean for sports business? According to NBC, the TAD approach allows companies advertising on NBC and sponsoring the games to buy across all the company’s platforms — not just television — in order to reach the most people in their target demographic. As a result, NBC said it hopes to be able to offer guarantees for the total audience delivered in a specific demographic (i.e., 18 to 49, or 25 to 54). The company is now basing its advertising guarantees on the number of people its content reaches as opposed to a ratings system based on the number of households (that his historically been the basis for measuring linear tv ratings).
NBS says this also means that there will be more opportunities for smaller companies to buy smaller advertising and sponsorship packages and thus get involved in the games. For example, a more targeted beauty products firm could focus on buying a sponsorship for a part of women’s gymnastics on digital or social rather than the entire games.
NBC isn’t the only entity that is signaling that the old ways of evaluating viewership and sponsorship need to be updated.
· GumGum Sports estimates that as much as 60 percent of sponsorship inventory is not being fully accounted for because the full measure of impressions, engagement and reach are not being accounted for; The solution is to better account for how people are seeing the product and engaging with it.
· The recently concluded World Cricket Cup set new records for television viewership and digital records. The digital platforms of the International Cricket Council recorded an unprecedented 2.6 billion video views. The ICC social channels added 12 million new followers and attracted 386 fan engagements since the tournament began just six weeks ago.
· FoxSports reported strong total audience ratings for the 2019 Women’s World Cup. The Final match versus the Netherlands drew 14.3 million TV viewers (22 percent more than for the 2018 men’s final), but it’s especially significant that the event attracted 20 million fans when people streaming were included. In addition, the Final was viewed by 18 million people in YouTube and Twitter and by an additional 1.6 million fans on Spanish-language network Telemundo.
· Television industry analyst Graybo recently published a 2019 study that shows that 65 percent of sports fans watch games most often on their smart phones, while 53 percent follow them on their laptops or tablets. Meanwhile, sitting in an easy chair staring at a conventional TV, came in at only 40 percent, yet that’s the metric the ratings agencies most often report.
In sum, more sophisticated ways of assessing the ways in which sports media are being consumed and engaged with are needed because consumers’ habits as sports fans are changing so rapidly. Attempts such as the ones shown here to better capture and account for how today’s global consumers are following and watching sports should be encouraged and applauded.
Note: To learn more, contact Dastrup at rwdast@gmail.com or Jensen at Ricard.Jensen@utsa.edu
