It’s Happening: How The JIC Is Helping The Industry Prepare For Its Inevitable Streaming Shift

The new Joint Industry Committee (JIC) created by OpenAP had its premiere public event last week. Dubbed the Measurement Summit, the event was a well-timed kick-off for the Upfront/Newfront season as well as a reminder that there is much work that needs to be done in order to make the shift to streaming.

What I like about the JIC (I mean aside from the fact that the Summit got me to the top of the new One World Trade Center building) is that it’s forcing the industry to do the work—or at least think about doing the work—that will need to be done to get ready for the inevitable shift to streaming.

But here’s the rub: while that shift is all you will hear about over the next month, we’re still very much in early days, and likely to be there for a couple of years.

As we explained in our newest report FASTs Are The New Cable, the companies that spend real money on TV advertising are not ready to shift big chunks of their budgets over to streaming.

They see TV as an image building medium and they look at ad-supported streaming and see Hulu and a bunch of reruns. So they’re going to keep their ad dollars on network prime time for now, thank you very much.

But that’s about to change.

As the ad-supported versions of Netflix, Disney+, Max, and others grow, they will (eventually) be able to offer big advertisers exactly what they want: uncluttered inventory of high production value original series with tens of millions of viewers.

In other words, ad-supported SVOD will become the new prime time, while the FASTs become the new cable, the place to reach all those viewers you are missing on prime time as well as certain niche audiences.

That’s all still a few years off. Maybe as many as four or five.

Which is good news for the JIC.

It gives them that much more time to get the industry’s ducks in order.

There is much that needs to be figured out, everything from cross-platform ad measurement to identity resolution to what data to use and how to verify it.

And there’s a lot of data.

This is all going to need to be figured out so that when the Pepsis and AT&Ts decide they’re ready to shift the bulk of their budgets to streaming, the industry will be ready for them.

That’s going to take a lot of planning and negotiating about something that is not all that sexy. But it needs to happen.

The Nielsen Angle

Much is being made of what Nielsen is up to and their decision not to participate in the JIC.

This isn’t all that baffling though: why would they participate in something whose goal is, in many ways, to enable the companies who’d replace them.

Sure it’s what the industry seems to want and Nielsen has yet to fully roll out their Nielsen One product, but they’re not totally crazy in assuming that there will be enough companies who still insist on working with them that they can just step in after the JIC has done all the work, make a tweak or two and give it their blessing.

Not totally crazy, but not what I would do if I were advising them.

Because they will want to reassure the industry that they are taking this shift seriously and working with all of the various networks and other measurement companies to make sure the transition happens as smoothly as possible.

Which they still may do—the JIC is only a few months old, and they may just have been waiting to see which direction things were headed (while also letting the Upfronts and Newfronts happen) before jumping in.

This would be in everyone’s best interest of course, because (and I have been banging on about this for years) all the various players need to wrap their heads around the fact that their main competition is not from each other but from Google and Facebook. That brand managers like the idea that they can (allegedly) track every penny and every click on digital platforms and that until TV can give them something similar, TV ad budgets will always be in danger.

All the more reason for the JIC.