An issue with OTA (Over-The-Air) networks has been identified. Since our ACR switch in July, it has caused local market airings to be incorrectly reported as national causing spend levels on some campaigns to be inflated. Our team will be pushing a fix for this tonight and AdSphere may be inaccessible for 30-60 minutes. When the fix for this issue is deployed, it will remove local airings across all OTA networks from our database since beginning of July. We sincerely apologize for this issue and not catching it sooner.
Update: The local OTA airings have been removed from the database and AdSphere reporting of units and spend for those impacted brands has been normalized.
Good progress made getting infomercial detections back online this weekend. There’s still a lot of work to do. This week the ACR team will focus on improving overall system stability, speed of reporting detections, and improving ad discovery.
ACR team has been working on some updates to further increase system stability which were pushed during the 8AM ET hour this morning. This should translate to more airings processed per hour, more networks catching up to current day reporting, and a host of other benefits. In the hours since the update, we have witnessed an increase in airings processed per hour which is another positive step forward. On the infomercial detection front, the team reports they are making good progress and they plan on rolling out fixes in this area tomorrow. Lastly, ad discovery has come back online this week and our internal research team is once again processing new creatives and brands.
Happy Saturday everyone! I am providing a more comprehensive update today. First and foremost, this ACR transition was not by choice but rather dictated by circumstances beyond our control. We have been working to prepare for this transition since Q4 of last year and, despite our best efforts, our new ACR team was unable to deliver the seamless transition we were promised. There have been numerous issues that our internal and ACR teams have spent countless hours trying to solve over the last two weeks. I have spent many a late night myself, staying up with the teams, as I can't rest knowing they are working until 3-4AM most days.
Initially, the focus was on network capture servers that were falling behind delaying reporting of airings. Some were worse than others but many networks fell "days" behind at one point earlier in the month. As of today, the vast majority of networks are reporting same day and within a few hours of real time, which is a huge improvement. For the handful of networks still lagging behind (by hours not days) the gap has been closing. Even over the past 24 hours we've seen significant improvements. The ACR team is working to further optimize but this aspect is getting more stable by the day with significant and measurable improvements. To help the systems catch up, we initially had to take infomercial detections offline. This past week, one of our focuses has been to bring them back online. Our team is working hard on this aspect and infomercial detections are starting to come into the system the past day. We're hoping to make significant gains in this department over the next few days. Also, when we took the infomercials offline, the ACR system started to report short form detections within certain infomercials. An initial fix for this was put into the system in the past 36 hours and we are currently working to eliminate the issue entirely while, at the same time, bringing back normal infomercial detections.
With everything going on, the team has also been chasing down another issue where the system was matching the wrong creative length in certain instances. A fix for this was pushed about 24 hours ago and we're already seeing a huge improvement. The team will continue to investigate edge cases daily until this problem is resolved.
As the systems catch up, the video and thumbnail creation routines are also playing catch up. The team is focusing on getting these back online in lock step with detections so that these assets are more immediately available in AdSphere. We hope to see the results of all of these improvements in the coming days so that we can begin to reprocess back days in July using the latest version of the updated ACR software.
Normally, our network feeds expire after 10 days but we have created a new procedure to permanently store the prior day video feeds in July so that our ACR team will be able to reprocess all prior days once we are happy with how the system is processing current day airings. The good news here is that the historic airings data in AdSphere for July will be updated/fixed in the coming days.
Our ad discovery routines are also new and were brought online this past week. Our team is playing catch up getting new July creatives into the system. Those of you receiving tracking and alerts emails will start to see these new ads coming through. In the interim, if you notice any of your ads are not being auto-detected, please consider uploading them using the AVS creative upload feature. If you don't have access to AVS, please email me at joseph.gray@drmetrix.com
As we enter this new media week, we can only hope that the worst of this transition is behind us. Now we will move into a phase were we will be looking at data on a daily basis trying to find issues and edge cases so that our ACR team may continue to fine tune the new system.
We continue to be amazed at the patience and understanding of our clients, many of whom have been sending well wishes to us during this difficult time. Thank you so much. We continue to be incredibly grateful for everyone's support.
Change often comes with risk as well as rewards. DRMetrix is changing some of its backend automated-content-recognition (ACR) technology and we are expecting some initial challenges but then ultimately huge rewards for our clients. We are very excited about the future.
Back in February of 2015, I blogged about the launch of our original ACR solution and the industry partnership that we had created. Since that time, our original ACR vendor/partner has been sold three times. As a result, DRMetrix began a journey last year to create our own next generation ACR technology.
Like all technologies, ACR is much more advanced today than it was back in 2012-2015 which is the period in which our original ACR solution was developed, and we have been routinely improving since then. In recent years, there have been more than routine improvements available. We have wanted to take advantage of newer ACR capabilities as well as add additional features such as state-of-the-art logo detection. Given the various changes in the ownership of our ACR vendor/partner, and shifting priorities, the situation with our original ACR provider became untenable and further drove our decision to invest in our own ACR solution.
The new solution we are investing in has been designed with various product improvements in mind to further service our clientele. Our transition to this new technology will be completed by the end of this month (June). During our initial month of full operation under the new systems (July), we are expecting temporarily slower than normal reporting of airings. We humbly ask for patience and understanding as we work through this very complicated technical transition. Instead of reporting airings within 30-40 minutes, please be aware that reporting delays of up to 2-3 hours from real time may be experienced. In the short term, we have focused our development team on other priorities knowing that the speed of reporting can be resolved in the coming weeks.
We are also working to enhance the detection of new direct-to-consumer (DTC) creative. For example, we will be able to key in on mobile creatives by recognizing app store logos. That said, early in the transition, the speed of new creative detection and registration is expected to be slower than normal as we transition and bring these new systems online. We anticipate enhancements and speed to increase during transition month of July.
We thank all of our valued clients who are on this journey with us and we are looking forward to delivering many new system enhancements in the coming months as a result of these changes. This will include a significant expansion of new networks and other exciting developments.
We have quite a few users having issues logging into Adsphere™ today. We updated the system to https over the weekend and it has created a few unexpected issues for which we apologize. So if you, or any of your colleagues, were having login issues earlier today, please try again and send an email to support@drmetrix.com if you encounter any issues.
Note: Your browser will view the https version of Adsphere as a new website and you may have to train your browser by manually typing in your credentials. You can also reset your credentials if necessary.
In this latest build of AdSphere™, our team has worked hard to squash many bugs while adding some great new features!
A new “Media Week” field has been added to airing detail reports to assist users who like to pivot table data by media week when running multi-week and lifetime exports.
Track When Networks Are Added or Removed From Schedules!
We are also debuting some enhancements to our network details page which will be expanded over the next couple of development sprints. The idea is to help users better track when networks are added or removed from schedules. Eventually, you will be able to setup reporting for any brand or creative that you wish to monitor to alert you when any of its networks go online or offline from week to week!
For this current release, you’ll notice at the bottom of the network details page two new columns have been added named “Active Weeks” and “Consecutive Weeks”. Active Weeks will reflect how many historic weeks there has been activity (at least one airing) for each network. Note: The system is using calendar day/weeks. Consecutive Weeks will show the number of continuous weeks of activity for each network. In the example below, the addition of a “new” flag shows networks that are new from week to week. Intended to be used as a weekly reporting feature, the new flag will only be shown when running reports for “last week” timeframe. When a network has been added back to the schedule, its consecutive week value will be zero and it will be flagged “new” in the Active tab for the week. As you can see below, Fox, GSN, and Discovery Life meet this definition. Starting at zero, the consecutive week value for these networks will increment each subsequent week as long as there continues to be activity. Should a network experience a week with zero airings, then its consecutive weeks counter will revert back to zero and it will appear in the “inactive” tab.
The newly added “inactive” tab shows lifetime statistics for all “inactive” networks for the period being studied. Also, when you are using “last week” date range, any network that was on the air two weeks ago, but had zero airings last week, will appear in the inactive tab and flagged as “new”. All other inactive networks will be shown with their lifetime data. Consecutive Weeks column will not appear on inactive tab as it will always be zero for inactive networks.
Please note that the default sort of both active and inactive tab favors any networks that are flagged new. These will be sorted first by spend and then all other networks will be sorted by spend. Whenever a network’s status changes in the last week period, either going from active-to-inactive or inactive-to-active, these networks will be flagged new on both active and inactive tabs as appropriate.
In an upcoming AdSphere release, we’ll activate the weekly tracking email feature whenever there is a network that changes status. Also, the new excel output for inactive tab will become operational at that time.
Keeping Track of your Filter Settings!
Over the years, there have been a lot of filters added to AdSphere. Many of us have experienced that moment when you run a report and something just doesn’t look right. Thus begins a game of discovering the offending filter and/or you can click the blue edit button, find and click the “reset”button, and have all of your filter settings put back to default.
Now, there is a better way. We are excited to release the following new feature as it will make AdSphere™ even easier to use! When you use ANY filter in the system, AdSphere will now track which filters are being used and allow you to reset any of them individually. In the following example, 5 different filters have been applied including custom date range, brand classification, creative duration, category, and a network filter. To reflect this, AdSphere shows the number of filters applied (5) with a small drop down arrow menu that you can expand for more details.
As you can see below, all of the filters options are listed. The status of all filters are shown so you can see which have been applied. In this example, it’s easy to see the 5 filters that have been changed/applied. Now, if we’re having a problem with a report caused by a rogue filter, it will be easy to find the culprit and reset just that one filter.
Global Search – Creative Export with Play Buttons!
Let’s say you want to create an excel output for all creatives in AdSphere that have the word “Hockey” in the creative name – or any other word or phrase of your choice. First step is to use Global search and enter the search term or phrase. Note: Global search allows you to put quotes around phrases when you only want to return results that match the phrase exactly. Next, click “View All” link for creatives. As you’ll see below, there is now a blue Excel button on the creative details page that will allow you to export the entire list of creatives with all details and creative play links which are valid for 30 days.
As always, we would appreciate reports of any new bugs or issues that you may experience with this new build.
We look forward to receiving your thoughts, ideas, and feedback on how we can make these features work better for you! Feel free to comment below.
If Covid taught the television advertising industry anything, it’s that performance-based metrics saved the day. While traditional TV advertising metrics were trying to figure out how to properly count pandemic eyeballs, performance-based television advertisers were counting consumer responses and consumer actions in real time. Joseph Gray, CEO of DRMetrix comments, “It’s amazing when during a huge media disruption you have one sector of the industry that has 20/20 vision. Performance-based television advertisers could see what was really happening with their TV advertising investment and KPIs in real time down to the network, daypart, and creative level. What they discovered is that response levels were at an all time high while media rates were at an all time low. Moreover, performance-based television advertisers could measure that consumers were still responding, engaging, and buying.”
In the early fall of 2020, DRMetrix released a study regarding the impacts of Covid-19 on the direct-to-consumer (DTC) television advertising industry. The study showed that the top 50 DTC web/mobile advertisers reduced their expenditures during the quarantine lock down period by 34% while the top 50 performance-based advertisers increased their media expenditures by an incredible 76.6% helping to save the day for many television networks.
DRMetrix’s new “Covid Edition” 5 x 5 industry study covers trends in the larger direct-to-consumer industry from 2016 – 2020 and shows the impact of Covid-19 on different classifications of the industry. The study stands as a testament to those performance-based television advertisers who helped to sustain the industry during difficult times and profited in the process. It also stands as an excellent case study for all of the web/mobile advertisers that have been flooding into television in recent years proving that performance-based techniques can help them make television more accountable similar to online advertising. Gray reflects, “When advertising on television, these advertisers don’t have to give up measurement and accountability. They can have their cake and eat it too if they discover and implement performance-based television techniques.“.
Download DRMetrix’s new 5 x 5 Industry Study by clicking here.
This topic gets a lot of attention these days. DRMetrix clients often ask, “When will DRMetrix monitor over-the-top (OTT) or connected television (CTV) campaigns?”. At the moment, we can only reply, “We don’t know” but we hope this blog post will provide some clarity and perspective on the topic.
As the evolution of the smart TV has taken root, the hope has been that these, and other smart devices such as Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, etc., would be able to use automated content recognition (ACR) technology to track and confirm ad delivery at the consumer glass or device level. Unfortunately, each OTT provider is currently operating within their own walled garden. That is to say, that they have imposed contractual requirements that prohibit the use of automated content recognition (ACR) technology, which is required for ad monitoring.
There are a couple of basic requirements for ACR ad monitoring to work:
The smart TV or device needs a reference database of commercial fingerprints to be able to recognize specific commercials.
The smart TV or device needs to be running ACR technology to be able to compare live audio or video data against this database to find commercial matches.
Requirement 1 refers to “Ad Discovery” where technology attempts to detect ad breaks and looks for unknown ad content. Today, human operators need to review unknown content to discover new ads from which to create unique ACR fingerprints. When a new ad is identified, it must also be properly associated to the advertiser, brand, industry category, etc. If advertisers decide to run unique ads for OTT and CTV campaigns, it would be difficult for companies like DRMetrix to gain access to these commercials in advance for fingerprinting purposes. That said, it would be feasible for DRMetrix to detect OTT and/or CTV airings for existing national ads that we already have in our database.
Requirement 2 is reliant on requirement 1. Additionally, the consumer owned smart TV or smart devices would have to be running ACR technology as this is what enables the recognition of unique ads. Here is where the OTT companies have effectively created their “walled garden” model. The smart TV and smart device manufacturers have to negotiate with the OTT companies in order to carry their apps. This is currently playing out between Roku and Google’s Youtube TV where recently both parties have been unable to come to terms where Roku is willing to continue carrying the Youtube TV app. Historically, the OTT companies have made it a requirement, as part of their contractual negotiations, that the smart devices must turn off their ACR capability once a consumer launches the OTT’s company’s app. If the device manufacturer doesn’t agree, then they are not allowed to carry the app. This is a struggle between opposing interests with consumers caught in the middle. Unfortunately, this means that the smart TV or smart device is unable to use ACR (point #2 above) as a method of detecting ads being delivered to consumers through their devices. This is a big challenge currently which is only dwarfed by the issue of consumer privacy with many consumers turning off the ACR features of their smart TV or smart device by simply opting out. Some consumers don’t want their electronic devices spying on them and reporting to third parties the programming and commercials they are watching. Both of these issues make point #2 above impossible which is the only way these devices can report on the commercials that are being delivered to individual consumers.
These are some of the issues that frustrate the monitoring of OTT campaigns. CTV campaigns are somewhat similar in that they are targeted to specific consumers where one encounters the issues of ad discovery (requirement 1) and ACR ad recognition (requirement 2). It has been difficult to determine upon ad recognition whether said ad is being inserted as part of a CTV campaign vs. a local cable or regional ad insertion. There may be ways to solve these problems but it would require working with individual smart TV and/or smart device companies each of which would only provide a partial view of the marketplace. The limiting factors are the scale that any one smart TV or smart device manufacturer has as well as how many of their users have not opted out of the ACR ad monitoring features. Because there hasn’t been enough consolidation in the marketplace to date, the costs of collaborating with various smart TV and/or smart device companies continues to be cost prohibitive. Of course, this may change in the future.
At DRMetrix, we have talked about subscribing to a variety of services and doing ad discovery and ACR ad recognition off of the OTT streams. The problem is, DRMetrix would be one consumer of many and the ads we would see and report on would be of limited value. For example, we could report those commercials that we discover running on our individual OTT streams but we would not be able to report on the size, scale, airings, or ad expenditures of various OTT campaigns. As we would love your feedback on this issue, please consider leaving us a comment or question!
An equipment related issue took our Bloomberg feed offline from Friday 4/9 at 23:00ET to Monday 4/12 at 14:00ET. We were unable to detect commercials during this timeframe. We apologize for the inconvenience.
