NBC recently announced that it would be streaming its coverage of the 2012 NFL Super Bowl online. NBC has streamed big events before (2010 Olympics, Sunday Night Football), but the big difference here is that it is selling video ads that will run exclusively on the online stream independently of the TV broadcast. This is a huge step for NBC as an ad seller since it is recognizing its untapped online audience and attempting to monetize it. Although the Super Bowl streams (restricted to the US only) are expected to greatly pale in comparison to linear TV viewership, Forrester expects the streaming audience of the Super Bowl to grow dramatically in years to come.

2011 has seen some major change in advertising. Although TV is still king, there’s no denying that online video, across a wide variety of devices, is experiencing strong growth. TV advertisers must now contend with smartphones, computers, and tablets as alternative sources of premium video content for engaging viewers with targeted ads. 

As media fragmentation increases, marketers will need to rethink their strategies and start to look at online video and TV as two sides of the same coin. In our latest report, “Why Marketers Must Integrate TV And Video Strategies” (subscription required), we make the case that marketers will merge their online video and TV advertising teams to more efficiently reach their audience across whatever screen they happen to be watching. Next month, our VP Practice Leader, David Cooperstein, will be speaking at the ANA TV & Everything Video Forum in New York about how marketers’ attitudes and strategies are shifting in the face of this new media convergence.

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.

My colleague Chris Stutzman reports from the 2011 ANA Masters of Marketing conference that Association of National Advertisers (ANA) CEO Bob Liodice used his keynote presentation to continue to hammer ICANN's generic top-level domain (gTLD) initiative. Maybe he should listen to Dana Anderson, SVP at Kraft Foods, who spoke about how "lasting change happens in leaps and bounds, not through incremental shifts."

I've been advising companies since ICANN's announcement in June on how to evaluate the .brand or .category opportunity, and most of those companies haven't found a bona fide new business opportunity that justifies the investment in a gTLD. But with few exceptions, they're looking at ICANN's plans as one of the biggest opportunities since the dawn of the Internet to take more control of their brand online, which is why the ANA argument troubles me.

The heart of the ANA’s arguments come down to claims that it will cost brands billions of dollars in defensive registrations to protect their trademarks from cybersquatters and other web perpetrators of all sorts. But let's dig into that a little deeper:

• Will it be billions of dollars? I have yet to see ANA produce any data to support its claims that the costs will be staggering.
• Will there be squatters on your .brand gTLD? If you are a brand owner with any IP rights to your brand, there’s no way a perpetrator will win an application for your .brand TLD. Even if one could, no squatter will spend $185,000 on it.

According to an Advertising Age article that discussed a new IBM survey released today, many CMOs "believe that marketing's financial return on investment will become a key marker of success in the next three to five years." With continued economic turmoil, marketing leaders are facing increased pressure to measure their results, but faced with an overhwelming amount of data, finding the right KPI needles in the haystack of information can be overwhelming. To sift through this data overload, we are conducting research for a report on how leading marketers will be measuring success. Take our survey on ROI measurement to tell us how you are changing your ROI approach for 2012, and we'll send you a copy of the results so that you can see how others are navigating the ROI path. 

Thank you!