This past week, Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer at GroupM, openly decried Nielsen’s national, sample-based TV measurement. Although Scanzoni has an inherent bias (GroupM’s parent WPP owns Nielsen competitor, Kantar, which has a set-top-box data-based TV measurement system of its own called RaPiDview), his words still speak volumes about the state of TV audience measurement and the need for a new system.

In our report earlier this year, "TV’s Currency Conversion" (client access required), we predicted that set-top-box data would start to gain traction in local markets where Nielsen’s samples were especially small and statistically unstable. Since then, data providers like Rentrak and Kantar have been gaining traction in these local markets, offering marketers granular user-level data from local cable companies’ set-top boxes. Nielsen, too, is aggregating set-top-box data as part of a push for a hybrid methodology, but these efforts are confined to its small local market; its legacy national measurement methodology continues to be based on a relatively small sample of households.

However, Nielsen has more problems on its hands than local TV measurement. Consumers are constantly multitasking with other devices while they watch TV. With attention spans no longer guaranteed during commercial breaks, marketers need new ways to measure their ads not just on TV but also across smartphones, tablets, and laptops as well. As media fragmentation continues to grow, marketers will need behavioral cross-platform metrics that measure their audiences across multiple media touchpoints.

Recently my colleague Sharyn Leaver and I had the opportunity to meet with Robert Mead and Michael Mathias, the CMO and CIO, respectively, at Aetna. They will be speaking at our upcoming CIO-CMO Forum on September 22, 2011, in Boston, so this serves as a bit of a preview to what should be an eye-opening presentation. Enjoy!

David Cooperstein: What external changes drove you to build a deeper partnership with your technology peers?

Robert Mead, senior vice president, Aetna marketing, product and communications: The US healthcare system is fragmented and well behind the curve in terms of price transparency and consumer-friendly products and services. The deep partnership between technology and marketing at Aetna lets us put leading-edge technologies and powerful tools and applications directly into the hands of people so that they can be confident consumers and informed patients. Our close collaboration with our colleagues in technology is driven by a few external factors:

• The increasing cost of care and the corresponding changes in employer-based insurance — consumers are being asked to take more ownership of their health and wellness and their healthcare spending.
• The introduction and rapid adoption of technology empowers consumers (and patients) to engage in the healthcare system where they are in life and in the way they want to be connected.
• Healthcare reform aims to bring millions of previously uninsured Americans into the marketplace as consumers.

In the wake of Nielsen’s and Facebook’s announcement of a new “Web GRP” metric, there has been some exciting debate over whether GRPs will be good for the advertising industry as a whole. Dave Morgan made some excellent points in Mediapost about why GRPs will ultimately be good for online advertisers. However, I respectfully disagree that web GRPs are a step forward for effective cross-platform measurement. 

Although it is true that TV gets the lion’s share of marketers’ budgets, that doesn’t necessarily mean that online measurement should be retrofitted to make “apples to apples” comparisons. On the contrary, marketers are becoming more accustomed to the granular level of metrics and accountability online media offers and will not be content to keep TV GRPs and get a “best fit” measurement of GRPs online. Even if the industry isn’t giving up on GRPs as TV currency, TV networks like CBS are moving away from GRPs as the standard and would like to get beyond age and sex if possible. As the online video market matures and over-the-top video consumption grows, I believe marketers will begin to see the discrepancy in accuracy between the ads they buy on a prime-time show on broadcast and the ads they buy that are delivered via a YouTube, Netflix, or Hulu app on a connected TV. 

Despite being the largest advertising medium (Forrester projects TV marketers will spend $76 billion on advertising in 2011), TV still lags in its ability to measure anything deeper than basic tune-in. Over the past eight months, we have been covering how recent innovations in TV measurement are making TV ads more targeted and accountable. Forrester clients can read our earlier reports on measurement that discuss media measurement across digital and traditional channels and the future of set-top-box data for TV measurement.

In Elizabeth Shaw’s report, "Use Social Media to Boost Your TV Audience," we make the call that TV networks should “look to new data sources to overlay on traditional data sources to measure the viewer engagement between social media and TV.”

A few weeks back, Bluefin Labs, a three-year-old startup, released a new product that establishes social media engagement metrics for TV shows. The product, Bluefin Signals, analyzes billions of public social media comments and millions of minutes of TV data each month and interprets them into actionable metrics like response level (the volume of comments for a given TV program) and response share (a program’s share of social response during its specific airing time). TV networks will now be able to quantify social media engagement on their programs and drill down deeper than simple tune-in.

I am excited! Not just about the fact that Forrester's Marketing Forum is just around the corner. I am excited because I just got to spend some time with Ross Martin, the energetic executive vice president (EVP) of MTV Scratch. His team is a center of innovation at MTV for helping marketers connect with millenials, and his enthusiasm for the next digital decade is palpable. If you are coming to the Forum in San Francisco next week, you will get to hear Ross and his client and counterpart Jim Trebilcock, CMO at Dr. Pepper Snapple (DPS) Group, talk about the nationwide launch of Sun Drop soda that kicked off a few weeks ago.

Not to spoil that story, here are some of the things Ross and I discussed about the future of marketing:

DC: Given what you have done with DPS, what do you see as the future agency model? Can media companies replace agencies?

RM: We see new and inspiring work from agencies every day and have been lucky to collaborate with some great partners. Much has been said about the challenges agencies face with so many new models emerging. We believe these new models will continue to evolve, as agencies large and small pursue new ways to serve their clients.

Great agencies will look to capitalize on the strengths of media companies in both traditional and nontraditional ways — from ad sales and integrated marketing to the kinds of services Scratch offers, such as design and product planning, retail activation, creative execution, social media, marketing strategy, and more.