Australia's plan to be a "fast follower" on a global push for cross-media audience measurement has shifted.

Developed under the remit of the Brussels-based World Federation of Advertisers’ “Project Halo”, Meta and Google have been among the lead funders and contributors to an open-sourced cross media measurement system using synthetic audiences that the UK has been leading in trials via Project Origin and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers [ISBA]. 

“We’re building a synthetic society here … it’s the best way of doing it, I think, because it just avoids any of the difficult privacy conversations,” the WFA’s Director of Global Media Services, Matt Green, told Mi3 in a previous interview on the Halo initiative. 

$100bn question

More than $100m has been spent so far on Origin, which like the US initiative, shifts funding and control of media audience measurement to advertisers. In the UK, a 0.1 per cent “Fractional Advertiser Contribution” (FAC) levy on advertising booked and collected by media agencies is the funding model, similar to how UK and Australian advertisers fund their self-regulatory advertising complaints bodies.

Unilever’s recently departed VP, Global Media, Sarah Mansfield, told Mi3 in a podcast and feature early in the Origin UK pilot that if the cross media project “did not deliver a double digit improvement in terms of the effectiveness of our media plans … then we are probably underestimating [the savings]. It’s at least 10 per cent.”

Mansfield said existing measurement solutions “just haven’t kept pace with the changes in consumer habits, especially in cross media management. There's been little convergence in the way media exposure is measured and it provides you with little opportunity, therefore, to understand true de-duplicated reach of a message and the impact of that in terms of the efficiencies and effectiveness of your advertising.”

That delivered a “super poor consumer experience,” said Mansfield. “People just get bombarded by the same ads all the time… We need the ability to be able to effectively measure and control ad frequency across platforms to deliver a better consumer experience and drive out inefficiencies and wasteful planning in our media communication plans.”

On a global basis, the advertising market is this year set to hit $1 trillion, which at its optimal, would mean the WFA’s open-sourced Halo cross media audience reach and frequency efficiencies would cut $100bn from the market.

US peak non-profit advertiser body, the ANA, has spun-off is cross-media initiative into a for profit unit, Aquila, which has appointed Kantar to build a single-source “cross-media calibration audience panel” as the basis for building out the bigger synthetic audience system. Accenture has been appointed to define and design technology requirements. 

The ANA estimated Aquila could take $50bn in “wasted spending” over three years.

MMM shift?

In Australia, an AANA working group met late last year to update its position on an advertiser funded cross-media system here – previous AANA CEO John Broome said it wanted to be a “fast follower” to the UK’s Origin initiative. But current boss, Josh Faulks, said his advertiser members had opted to hold on any moves to deploy an advertiser-controlled media system, partly because methodologies in media measurement were evolving swiftly from audience reporting for advertising to business outcomes. Market mix modelling [MMM] he said could be part of an expanded cross-media measurement remit. 

“The big question is whether or not this is the solution, or is it MMM – what Mutinex and other people are doing?” Faulks told Mi3. “The big ambition here is to start with reach and frequency, then move to attribution and outcomes. We're happy to explore and look at it, but there's absolutely no decision made for Australia to pursue it. It is actually an eminently reasonable and sensible position to take – there’s some pretty advanced measurement tools at the moment. Does Australia need it or not?".

Halo slippage

In the UK, Project Origin, which is expected to progressively cover 80 per cent of UK media spend, has not been without its challenges. The involvement of Google and Meta in funding and building the WFA’s source code for Halo has caused friction with UK broadcasters who have been holding out on their involvement in Project Origin. Some of the resistance has come from video viewing definitions, which for Meta and Google’s YouTube are optimal at 1-2 seconds while TV system definitions are much higher at 15 seconds of exposure. 

Origin has moved to an industry-wide funding levy on ads to address concerns over Meta and Google’s funding and development of the open-sourced code.

Eyes are also on how the two tech giants might seek to incorporate their own open-sourced MMM models in to the Halo methodology and whether those products are engineered to deliver more favourable results to their respective channels such as social, search and YouTube.

Meta’s MMM is called Robyn and Google’s Meridian. Google is making an aggressive global marketshare play with Meridian with substantial incentives being offered to global holding companies and agencies to white label Meridian. Publicis Group was one of the first to publicly announce a deal with Google on Meridian. 

On the broader challenges faced by the UK’s Origin project in aligning big tech and big media in a single source cross-media system, Faulks said: “You'd want to make sure you've got the broadcasters and the rest of your industry with you.” 

Quite the juggling act.