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SeeSaw lists its own next big thing: Video-everywhere metrics

SeeSaw says it has developed new metrics that measure DOOH video the same way video is measured on other media.

March 24, 2011 by Christopher Hall — w, t

Earlier this month SeeSaw Networks was named to The Wall Street Journal's "The Next Big Thing" list; and now the company has announced its own next big thing:

SeeSaw, working in conjunction with advertising and media planning research expert Leslie Wood, has developed new reach and frequency metrics for digital out-of-home video. The new metrics, according to SeeSaw executives, will allow video played on digital out-of-home to be measured similarly to video on other media.

SeeSaw earlier this week announced the development of its "proprietary reach-and-frequency model that calculates media plan audience deliveries across multiple digital place-based media networks."

The new modeling system allows advertisers and brands to quantify and measure DOOH networks "in a way that is commensurate with the trends that we see today," SeeSaw founder and board chairman Monte Zweben said in a phone interview.

Those trends are essentially that video is emerging everywhere, from the Internet to mobile phones to, of course, digital place-based media, Zweben said.

"We see that advertisers are accessing video in a more comprehensive way," he said. "They're looking at their video assets — whether these are ad spots or branded entertainment clips or informational pieces of content — they're looking at video holistically and comprehensively, and they need a way to compare their video investments across channels."

According to Zweben, the standard way of measuring video is through "reach and frequency," and place-based media "has been particularly difficult to measure across those metrics" because "getting a reach metric across multiple networks and multiple places in individual networks is extremely hard."

What SeeSaw has done is take "tried and true principles of locality" that had been developed for the cable industry and applied it to place-based media, making the company the only one in the DOOH marketplace that can provide reach and frequency for optimized place-based media plans, according to Zweben.

"We now can provide reach and frequency metrics, so they can compare us to other investments they may make on television, online and on mobile," he said.

But how does SeeSaw come up with these metrics?

According to Zweben, SeeSaw uses a database model that allows the company to use improving amounts of data it acquires about places to drive the metrics. The kinds of inputs that go into the model are measures of impressions at various locations and measures of locality between locations, he said. In other words, knowing that a particular health club is near a particular gas station is an important element of the model, he said, as well as models of the available audience, not just in individual venues, but across multiple venues. The modeling allows SeeSaw to assess the likelihood that a particular audience would go to both a particular gas station and a particular health club, or a certain health club and a certain grocery, Zweben said.

"Those statistics are inputs to our model, and over time we will get better and better validated data to support the reach and frequency data," he said.

But reach and frequency metrics are not unique to SeeSaw, so what makes the company's numbers different or better?

According to Gene Davis, the company's vice president of engineering, SeeSaw's are different because they are actually "modeling all these different networks simultaneously, and any subset of those venues, taking into account their locations."

"So it knows, for instance, if you have 100 gas stations in Los Angles and 100 taxis in New York, that's going to have a higher reach than, let's say, 100 gas stations and 100 taxis all on top of each other all in New York, for example," he said. "So SeeSaw's model is smart enough to figure those kinds of things out, taking into account geographic components as well as the heterogeneous nature of the networks."

SeeSaw's reach and frequency model was created in conjunction with Wood, an industry consultant with expertise in advertising and media planning research, according to the announcement from SeeSaw. Wood is currently co-chair of the Advertising Research Foundation's 360 Media & Marketing Super Council.

"Digital place-based media plan deliveries must consider not only the media consumption of an audience member within a particular venue where a video ad network is present, but also the complex patterns of visiting multiple venues within a given span of time," Wood said in the announcement from SeeSaw.

The SeeSaw announcement also included praise from Sean Smith, SVP & Group Media Director at media agency DraftFCB.

"I am very encouraged about this development, as getting to trustworthy and comparable audience delivery metrics is important for digital place-based networks. They need to be viewed and compared on a somewhat 'level playing field' as other video platforms," Smith said in the announcement. "My planning teams look to assemble holistic video offers that deliver the highest engagement levels possible against consumer segments, and we should have in many cases, similar metrics and estimates to get us there."

Most importantly, Zweben said, the new modeling will make it esier for brands and agencies to use DOOH as part of a comprehensive video-everywhere strategy:

"What this reach and frequency model allows is for a planner to be able to look at how digital place-based media can augment and complement a TV plan and an online video plan, creating a comprehensive video-everywhere plan all on the same measurement standards, comparing them apples to apples."

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