The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) Summit 2024 delivered fresh perspectives on identity resolution, audience fragmentation, and the evolving TV ecosystem. Here’s what we learned and why it matters to the future of media measurement.
Media measurement is at a critical juncture, with the industry racing to adapt to new technologies, shifting consumer behaviors, and evolving regulatory frameworks.
As TV and video consumption splinters across devices and platforms, the need for consistent, reliable identity resolution (IDR) has become increasingly urgent. The complexities of audience fragmentation and data loss have forced companies to rethink how they approach identity and measurement at scale.
To that end, CIMM, in collaboration with OpenAP, launched a strategic review of the identity resolution ecosystem to address the challenges of stitching together data across disparate identity spines.
David Levy, CEO of OpenAP, has been at the forefront of these efforts, emphasizing the importance of durable, privacy-safe identity solutions that can serve both buyers and sellers in the advanced TV landscape. OpenAP’s commitment to this project reflects its broader goal of establishing a more transparent and interoperable marketplace, ensuring that IDR evolves to meet the growing demands of advertisers and consumers alike.
Dennis Buchheim, Managing Director of ThinkMedium, shared that while identity resolution has made strides, the current environment is “fragmented and inconsistent,” calling for data quality and interoperability improvements. He emphasized the need for more transparency, saying, “The industry must work together to create an adaptable, privacy-safe identity ecosystem that can evolve with changing regulations and consumer expectations.”
At the recent CIMM Summit, sessions provided a look at the industry today with a roadmap for what lies ahead as data quality, transparency, and interoperability dominate the conversation.
5 Big Ideas We Took Away From CIMM Summit
Insight 1: Identity Resolution Is Still Fragmented — But Progress Is Being Made
The complexity of identity resolution continues to challenge the TV and video marketplace, but significant advancements are being made.
- Fragmentation Issues: The TV identity ecosystem is fragmented, with different identity spines and providers offering disparate solutions, making it difficult to track audiences across multiple screens and devices.
- Comcast’s Solution: Comcast’s deterministic signal authentication offers a promising privacy-safe solution to unify fragmented audience data, yet broader industry standardization remains elusive.
- Data Quality Challenges: The lack of data quality in some identity resolution practices is a consistent concern, with many speakers calling for more transparency and better labeling of data sources.
- Need for Buyer Education: As identity solutions evolve, marketers need more education around data quality and transparency, ensuring that they understand the signals they are working with and how those signals influence campaign outcomes.
Insight 2: Fragmentation of Media is Both a Blessing and a Curse
The rise of programmatic buying and connected TV (CTV) is transforming how media is bought and sold, but the growing complexity is a double-edged sword for buyers.
- Opportunities for Personalization: In the session Building the TV Ad Market of the Future, speakers like Freewheel’s Mark McKee and LG Ad Solutions’ Michael Hudes pointed to opportunities that media fragmentation offers. McKee described how personalization across fragmented content creates new touchpoints for audience engagement.
- Challenges in Measurement: As content spreads across different platforms, buyers face the growing challenge of managing reach and frequency. As Katie Klein noted, the difficulty lies in tracking audiences across a fragmented media landscape while delivering meaningful performance metrics.
- The Role of LG Ads Innovation Lab: Hudes emphasized that behavioral and emotional cues are critical to surfacing relevant content, making personalization even more integral to managing fragmented content across multiple devices.
Insight 3: The Shift to Multi-Currency Measurement is Gaining Momentum
Multi-currency measurement is quickly becoming necessary in advanced TV, but implementation is still in its early days.
- Enabling Optionality: During Ready or Not, The Advanced TV Ad Market Is Here, panelists like Paramount’s Michele Stone stressed that offering measurement flexibility — allowing buyers to transact based on the currency they’re comfortable with — is critical to the future of advertising. As agencies work with multiple measurement providers, they are increasingly focused on aligning these metrics to serve both buyers and sellers effectively.
- Growing Complexity: Publicis Media’s Sam Armando highlighted the complexity agencies face when dealing with multiple currencies during major events like the Super Bowl, where several measurement systems must work together. The challenge lies in ensuring consistency across these systems while maintaining accuracy.
Insight 4: AI’s Role in Measurement is Just Beginning
AI-driven media measurement is still in its infancy, but it has the potential to revolutionize how media is planned, bought, and measured.
- AI for Personalization and Automation: In the session Into the Future of Media Measurement, panelists discussed how AI will drive more personalized and immersive experiences by 2030. Automating content delivery and optimizing audience engagement is seen as a major benefit.
- Ongoing Challenges: AI also introduces challenges. As Sonata Insights’ Debra Aho Williamson pointed out in the AI-Driven Roadmap to 2030, questions around transparency, data ethics, and the accuracy of AI-driven insights remain unresolved. CIMM”s Tameka Kee stressed the importance of industry-wide collaboration to address these issues and ensure AI can deliver on its promises.
Insight 5: CTV’s Growing Influence on Performance Metrics
Connected TV (CTV) now plays a bigger role in performance-based advertising, offering brands opportunities to drive outcomes that were once difficult to measure with linear TV.
- Impact of Live Audiences: IPG Media Brands’ Maureen Bosetti noted that while linear TV still offers significant reach, CTV complements it with advanced performance metrics. Brands are increasingly using CTV’s flexible formats to deliver both brand-building and performance-driven campaigns.
- Cross-Screen Attribution: As highlighted by the panelists in Building the TV Ad Market of the Future, the ability to track audience behaviors across multiple screens is improving, with programmatic buying allowing advertisers to optimize reach and frequency in previously challenging ways.
Navigating these growing complexities — identity resolution, audience fragmentation, and measurement standardization — requires collaboration across the sell-side, buy-side, and tech platforms.
The future of media measurement depends on the industry’s ability to adopt multi-currency frameworks, embrace AI-driven solutions, and improve the cross-screen attribution model to reflect today’s fragmented viewing habits. As AI integration advances and CTV continues its rise, the next steps will involve finding ways to unify fragmented data ecosystems and develop scalable solutions for cross-screen measurement.
Moving forward, the industry must keep pace with technological innovations and regulatory shifts to ensure that identity resolution and media measurement evolve together to support advertisers, publishers, and viewers alike.