MBPT Spotlight: Resurrecting the Power of Television Advertising -- Via the Set-Top Box

[Commentary] The January deal where CBS Corporation agreed to use Rentrak audience-measurement services sent a clear message that big data, a staple of Internet measurement and programmatic exchanges, is now fast becoming -- if it hasn’t already -- a standard for the television medium.

And it’s about time. Our industry has understood for quite a while the intractable problem of using small samples across hundreds of cable channels with increasingly fragmented viewing.

Thanks to smart TVs and set-top box data, television is entering a new world of audience measurement and accountability. Not only have we been dealing with unstable program ratings that have huge sampling errors, but there have been unintended, systematic biases, such as the understatement of cable audiences documented by the “zero cell” phenomenon experienced in local meter and diary markets.

The solution to the sample-size problem has been sitting right in front of us for over ten years, but it has taken the resources and entrepreneurship of Rentrak to make that solution a big-time reality. I’m speaking, of course, about that ubiquitous set-top box (STB), which has the ability to passively capture anonymous, continuous electronic streams of television viewing exposure vs. channel tuning on even the smallest of niche channels, cable networks and local markets.

[Lieberman is president and CEO, Viamedia]