Measurement Is A Lot Like Politics, The Oscars And The Future Of Film
1. Measurement Is A Lot Like Politics
Nielsen announced their long awaited Big Data+ Panel measurement system this week, which set off yet another round of wailing, replete with the requisite gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
It was, the sentiment went, too little, too late. And why was the MRC endorsing it? Weren’t they just Nielsen’s highly-paid pawns?
And to that, my response has been a rather Gallic shrug.
C’est la guerre.
Because for so many of the people making decisions around measurement, the lamentations are irrelevant. They are not paying attention to the details. All they know is that Nielsen finally has smart TV and set top box data and that means one more hassle is now off their plates.
Call them “low information buyers.” And like low information voters, they’ve not really been all that tuned in to all the brouhaha going on in the currency and measurement space. Their company has always used Nielsen. Their clients expect Nielsen and generally don’t complain much about it. And so there’s no reason to look at other options, to question the status quo.
That’s for someone way above their pay scale.
Which is not an ideal outcome, in either measurement or politics, but is unfortunately the way things are.
Until, of course, they’re not.
Why It Matters
Nielsen has been trying to figure out streaming measurement for a good ten years. Remember DAR (Digital Ad Ratings)? One of the big problems it faced was that many of the networks did not want to cooperate. They were convinced that their reassurances that falling ratings were due to “people watching on streaming” would be exposed by DAR. And so they refused to play ball.
There were other attempts and other failures along the way.
And so a whole varied ecosystem of alternative measurement sources sprung up. Companies like (in alphabetical order) Comscore, Innovid, iSpot, Samba and Videoamp. Each has something unique to offer the market. Some more than others. Some way more than others.
But to the low-information buyer, none of that matters.
Changing decades old systems is hard. And the payoff, at least for them, is negligible. So they’re going to wait for someone else to take the lead.
And what’s interesting is that they may not have to wait all that long.
Several of the big network groups are already using multiple vendors for both measurement and currency. Paramount famously even dumped Nielsen.
Throughout the industry, there’s a growing understanding that the advantages to undoing Nielsen’s monopoly are twofold.
First, where there is competition, there is innovation. It’s the only way to ensure that improvements keep happening at a rapid pace. Measurement will, for instance, need to adapt to the upcoming rollout of IPv6, where IP addresses can no longer be relied on to provide information about specific households and their locations.
The other, much bigger reason competition is beneficial is that it keeps prices in line. Nothing says “we can charge you whatever we want” like a monopoly.
And if there’s been one complaint that resonates most about Nielsen, it is the unfair advantage they have in contract negotiations.
Not unusual for a monopoly, but still…
Now what this all means is that Nielsen’s competitors are not going away. Too many companies have discovered the benefits of multiple vendors. Networks for the aforementioned reasons, and agencies because it creates more work for them helping clients figure out the best measurement sources and how to interpret multiple results.
It also means that Nielsen’s not going anywhere either.
Whatever issues people may have with the ways they maintain their position, the new protocol is not without merit. Which means that all those people who are resistant to change can keep on keeping on. Maybe their company will add on an additional currency vendor or two (“currency” and “measurement” being two distinct-but-related things.) Or maybe they won’t. It’s not up to them and if the client is happy using Nielsen, then they are every bit as happy.
It is, as noted, not all that different than politics.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are in the measurement space, you need to accept the fact that Nielsen didn’t ride off into the sunset. The conventional wisdom was wrong on this one.
You also need to accept the fact that the alternative measurement companies aren’t riding off into the sunset either. At least not most of them.
The industry seems to have accepted the fact that there is a benefit to having options. And so you need to plan for options. Multiple options, since there seems to be no clear-cut consensus on who the alternatives should be. Or how many of them.
If you are Nielsen, remember that you dodged a bullet. That many people had left you for dead. And that you are only as good as your last update.
If you are one of the other vendors, realize it’s not a bad thing to have Nielsen still in the game.
It gives you some legitimacy. Meaning that without them, it’s just as likely that someone like Google jumps in. Or that the sort of grading-your-own-homework schemes that abound on digital come into vogue. Having Nielsen doesn’t just give you someone to position yourself against—it gives the industry a reason to continue using third-party measurement sources.
So there’s that too.
2. The Oscars And The Future Of Film
The Oscars are, ostensibly, about rewarding people for their artistic achievements. But they’ve always been about marketing too. Both individual films and the industry in general.
This worked well when the films winning the awards were popular films that lots of people had seen, or, at the very least heard of. Films starring actors whose names most people recognized.
But as streaming becomes more and more dominant and as home theaters built around 75-inch HDTVs become more common, the industry seems to have lost its way.
It’s torn between rolling out bland sequels to Marvel movies that do well at the box office (but less well with critics) and promoting overly quirky “art house” films that seem to leave both critics and audiences baffled.
That dichotomy was on display this year when the most nominated film, with 13 nominations, was a French/Belgian production called Emilia Perez, a musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord. While the film did win the Jury Prize at Cannes, other critics were less impressed: much has been made of the fact that the film has a 74% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience score of just 20%.
But it wasn’t just Emilia Perez.
To quote the New York Times, no bastion of populist sentiment or conservative thought, “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences showered little-seen movies rooted in progressive politics with nominations for the 97th Oscars on Thursday.”
Why It Matters
Movies, at least movies watched in theaters, may be a dying genre.
In my little corner of northern New Jersey, the movie theaters that anchored the downtowns of my hometown and the two adjacent towns shut down during the pandemic and have not been replaced.
And with so much to watch on streaming, movies no longer stand at the center of popular culture in a way they once did.
Let’s look at the 2015 nominations: Birdman, American Sniper, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash. All movies you’ve probably heard of and yet also movies that were not glaringly commercial or overly art house.
More than that though, they were movies that set the cultural conversation, references everyone seemed to get.
This year’s batch? With the exception of Wicked, not so much.
Now it may just be that this is where we are with movies, at least for now. Blockbusters or ultra-art house.
That this is the final shattering of the Great 20th Century Monoculture, and that the culture wars have become too ferocious to accommodate movies that feel “big” while also speaking to large swaths of the population. And that the people who might make those sorts of films are now writing for television.
What You Need To Do About It
If you’re the Oscars, you might want to rethink the move to expand the number of Best Picture nominees. It was done, originally, to make the category more inclusive, but given the current state of the industry, it seems to be counterproductive. Keeping the list at just five nominees might help you to create more buzz for the nominated films (marketing!) while also reinforcing the notion that going to the movies is all about films with broad appeal, something you can still do on date night.
I mean it’s great to show off your art house chops and all, but when the likes of the New York Times is dissing you about it (and dissing you hard) you might want to reconsider.
Because again, the Oscars are also about marketing. Let the Golden Globes do art house.
If you’re a streaming service like Netflix and you’re producing a whole lot of movies, I get that slicing and dicing audiences is your thing, and that certain films can help you reel in certain audiences as subscribers. But I’d also suggest that films that reach wide audiences and become part of the national psyche will do more for you in terms of bringing in subscribers and of burnishing your image overall at a time when churn is your biggest issue.
If you’re a movie fan, don’t give up. I suspect all this is temporary and that we’ll soon return to an era when great stories were told in two hours.
Not two seasons.