What you need to know:

• VOZ became Australia's official total TV measurement currency on 29 December.
• Sitting under it is a "world leading" foundational dataset, per The Trade Desk's James Bayes, but the roll-out has been tainted by criticism about how that's been packaged up as a BVOD trading solution under VOZ Streaming.
• In stitching together BVOD and linear currencies, VOZ strips out some of the rich audience layers that sit alongside the older TAM and VPM currencies.
• While OzTam has plans to beef up the new service's data offering, the perceived gaps have stalled adoption in the short-term. One agency exec estimates that only 15 to 20 per cent of their video campaigns were being trading through VOZ, versus the older currencies.
• It's still early days, and while those partnered with at least one of the three launch partners in The Trade Desk, Magnite and Microsoft Advertising are set, agencies and advertisers aligned with other DSPs will have to wait. Nexxen and DV360 are set to be the next adtechs in line, with Yahoo DSP also in talks with OzTam.
• However there's still the problem of silos, and the inability of VOZ to capture premium video ecosystem beyond linear and BVOD has the buy-side looking elsewhere for cross stream measurement.
• Automatic content recognition (ACR) is one such alternative that's fast gaining traction, as demonstrated by the early success of Beatgrid. DSPs have been partnering up with CTV providers to get in on the action too. 

Slow lift off

For all the noise in the leadup to the big event, the market seems to have had little to say about the official arrival of VOZ over the summer break.

That, says Magna's Lucy Formosa Morgan, is likely because little has tangibly changed for those on the buy side.

While she nods to the “huge amount of work” done by agency teams and third-party software providers to get here, the national Magna MD says now it’s just a matter of media agencies “changing the files that we use from TAM files to VOZ files”.

The there's the VOZ Streaming trading solution, which lags as agencies wait for their DSP partners to onboard the new system - so far that's just The Trade Desk, Microsoft Advertising and Magnite. The holdcos, with their numerous partnerships, are likely to be covered in that bundle, but a good chunk of indies are still waiting.

Amongst them is one of the country’s biggest indie media shops – though not for long. Its ad tech partner Nexxen is now next in-line to integrate with VOZ Streaming, alongside Google's DV360, to gain access to the new data.

Meanwhile, Yahoo director of commercial and platforms AUSEA Andrew Gilbert told Mi3 the company was in “active discussions on integrating VOZ [Streaming] into our DSP”, but there was “no set timeline” at this stage.

Another indie agency told Mi3 it had accessed the VOZ currency through Nielsen, but that the onboarding process took weeks post-launch. They’d started using it for planning and reporting, but realistically, didn’t expect VOZ Streaming to be implemented into their video trading process until at least the end of March.

Suffice to say it’s been a somewhat anticlimactic start for the touted ‘revolutionary’ VOZ system.

More broadly, The Trade Desk's James Bayes says the way that data has been packaged into the VOZ Streaming digital trading currency has caused some frustrations, leaving agencies to turn elsewhere for the breadth and depth of targeting they require. Magna's Formosa Morgan agrees and hopes OzTam will bring in "richer audiences to target against".

OzTam points to first party data matching via the Snowflake clean room, which is on the horizon, and other data partnerships said to be in the pipe. In the meantime, measurement firms like Beatgrid are powering ahead with panel-based automatic content recognition (ACR) measuring cross-channel advertising exposure – not content –  while DSPs push to build out their own versions, although most don't have people-based panels as their anchor. And a universal view of total TV and video viewing, beyond broadcaster linear and digital assets, remains a scramble. The next six months is likely to determine if VOZ can rein in a market going every which way in audience measurement and trading.

Kudos due

As Kinesso head of investment and planning, Charlie Allat, puts it, the overarching sentiment agency-side is “it's nice to see competitors unify and work together to face an enormous threat that sits external to them”, but “it would be nicer if they'd have recognised that sometime earlier”.

“That said, it seems like it's progressing in the in the right direction, in terms of what they're trying to do,” he adds.

James Bayes, who runs The Trade Desk’s local outpost, says VOZ was an “enormous undertaking” OzTam set out to deliver to “a pretty ambitious roadmap”, that frustrations were to be expected.

Amongst the criticisms he’s seen directed to the new measurement system were “moving deadlines, lack of transparency in its development, and the data set being cumbersome and difficult to navigate”.

But Bayes reckons there’s not been enough credit given for the “remarkable” dataset that’s resulted. “There’s 16 million devices in Australia with an audit of SDK implementation that measures every stream started, every stream stopped, what programs were watched – census level data at a granular level, with unified identity attached to each device," he says.

“When we talk to our global teams about that, it’s world leading. The foundational data set that sits underneath [VOZ] is incredible.”

He flags the activation of BVOD co-viewing functionality on VOZ Streaming as a “really positive step forward” – and one touting a more transparent methodology than the likes of Google. VOZ currently models BVOD co-viewing (multiple viewers simultaneously watching via a single connected TV) using a combination of signals under its Video Player Measurement (VPM) service. When the VOZ Streaming co-viewer trading functionality hits later this year, bid requests will be duplicated for every single co-viewer in a household. Magna's Formosa Morgan suggests it will be a "free kick" for broadcasters who'll be able to monetise co-viewing audiences for the first time.

Trading woes

Bayes might have plenty of good to say about what has been achieved within VOZ itself, but he suggests there’s some valid concern sitting around “how that data has been packaged up to enable single-view trading of broadcaster BVOD audiences. “That's when you've kind of then got to separate VOZ as a content measurement currency, and VOZ Streaming as a digital trading currency.”

He says the issue lies in part with the fact that pulling together increasingly fragmented audiences across services and devices is a “really complex” goal. Per Bayes, “it's never been harder to conceptualise, strategise, execute and measure a cross-screen video campaign before”.

Thus, stitching the network's BVOD audiences into one trading solution entails a few tradeoffs on the level of advanced targeting and attribution that can be layered with the older TAM and VPM currencies.

The resulting lack of depth in the VOZ Streaming service seems to have so far kept advertisers at bay. One multinational agency exec told Mi3 they estimated only 15 to 20 per cent of video campaigns at the holdco was being traded through VOZ Streaming. The rest, they said, were going through the old – but arguably richer – direct and programmatic BVOD trading models, which co-exist with the new system.

"“If you are a brand that that that doesn't buy a lot of linear TV, that is a heavy user of advanced programmatic video solutions, then VOZ Streaming is probably not going to be right for you, because the real benefit of VOZ Streaming is about kind of stitching together broadcast and BVOD," per Bayes.

But OzTam says it's written into the plan.

Per VOZ Streaming lead, Dorus van den Biezenbos: "The market is confirming its increasing uptake of VOZ Streaming" post holiday season, driven by both buy side demand and the services' imminent expansion across additional ad tech partners in the short term. It'll likely get another bump with a number of enhancements that are in the pipeline for this year – including first party data matching that's set to anonymise user data from each of the network's BVOD services via the Snowflake clean room environment."

Van den Biezenbos says that will "most likely" land in the second half of 2025, and will enable "advertisers to target precise personas" based on demographics like age, gender, and viewing behaviours. Plus, OzTam has promised further data partnerships later into the year.

But that will do little to fix the siloed view that is built into the BVOD only view - and while the VOZ currency itself makes a leap in stitching linear and BVOD, it's still separate from the rest premium video ecosystem. 

“To leverage the cross-screen reach and frequency reporting across linear TV and BVOD is very important, and managing those campaigns is very important, but to get to that brands need to sacrifice holistic frequency capping across publishers," explains Bayes.

“It removes their ability to overlay advanced audiences on the buy-side. People are making compromises around their ability to link total video buyers to outcomes like, footfall, traffic, and those sorts of things that are standard capabilities that sit within a DSP.”

“With only Seven, Nine, Ten and SBS involved, it's only relevant to a small subsection of premium video,” says Bayes. “That's not giving a full picture of the overall market that people are buying against.

Buyers are on the same page. For Formosa Morgan, her wish list goes beyond the inclusion of SVOD and AVOD. She'd also like to see VOZ “bring in big data” to create “richer audiences to target against”. 

The race to total screens

Part of the challenge for VOZ is that plenty of others have filled the gap in the time it took to get the new currency off the ground.

Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) is one such alternative that's fast gaining traction. The tech is tapped by the likes of Beatgrid to measure cross-media by identifying audio visual content played on connected devices. Beatgrid’s solution, for example, can measure TV, digital video, audio, out of home and in-store footfall, through a single source mobile-based panel.

Players like Adgile are also ACR-based while the likes of Nexxen has partnered with VIDAA – the smart TV operating system used by Hisense – to deliver its own ACR offering. The programmatic ad platform has also partnered with The Trade Desk to provide direct access to those ACR data segments via The Trade Desk DSP.

Samba TV and Samsung Ads are likewise slinging ACR signals – Yahoo DSP is said to have built some ‘phenomenal tools’ off the former’s dataset, while the latter has buddied up with OMG.

The lot of them are thought to be in the race to build a database that can identify YouTube and other audio visual content that appears on the big screen in the living room. Agency groups are following suit, according to one senior ad tech exec with knowledge of at least two major holding companies that are exploring ACR as an alternative to VOZ.    

Kinesso's Allatt, who played a hand in Kmart’s successful Beatgrid trial, attests that such screens measurement tools might not provide “100 per cent certainty” but they’re making agencies comfortable enough to give a strong point of view to clients.

“When you're getting two or three different sources agreeing on in-channel measurement, and a few hints on the crossovers from broader research or occasional studies, that can be very powerful as a baseline to plan and buy from,” he says.

“I think it’s stronger to be able to do that across a whole ecosystem, even as an estimate, rather than looking in limited silos – which is realistically what we're still faced with in VOZ.”

ACR isn’t the only alternative cutting OzTam’s grass. Agencies are also building out (or acquiring) their own data units that overlay a richer set of behavioural, demographic data and touch points – IPG has Acxiom, for example.

Broadcast's stake in the ground

While VOZ has its shortcomings, it’s also been a welcome a testament to the ability of Australia’s free to air networks to belatedly put their differences aside.

“Local broadcasters have been under enormous pressure from the introduction of global streamers and fragmenting consumer attention YouTube which has just stripped the local ad market through the opaque, non-transparent, targeting and ad models where they are marking their own homework,” says Bayes.

“It's a very competitive, very challenging environment. Our view would be they're stronger together, so I really applaud the collaboration between a lot of really complex stakeholders.”

Likewise, Allatt reckons VOZ is uniquely placed, with all the airtime it’s getting, to get clients moving in the right direction.

“Agencies will probably open up avenues for that conversation to be had – which can create comfortability because it comes from a traditional space and familiar partners. I think that's just good for the whole ecosystem, regardless."

With streamer ad businesses on the march, broadcasters will be hoping six years of slog prove worth it.