VAB and 4A’S join ANA Cross-Media Measurement Effort

The ANA announced that the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) and the 4A’s (American Association of Advertising Agencies) have joined the ANA’s Cross-Media Measurement (CMM) initiative.

The two organizations join leading brands such as Unilever, P&G, General Motors, Walgreen’s L’Oréal, Verizon, PepsiCo, among others, along with media platforms including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and TikTok on CMM’s steering committee.

The ANA CMM initiative represents the ANA’s ongoing efforts to develop a privacy-preserving cross-media measurement solution for the marketing industry, unlock value for all stakeholders, and deliver an improved ad experience for audiences through transparent measurement. The project will pilot a technical solution in 2022 paving the way for a scaled adoption. CMM is an ANA strategic priority and is championed by the ANA board and the ANA’s Global CMO Growth Council.

The addition of VAB and the 4A’s to the committee solidifies the TV and the agency communities as full participants in CMM, which brings together advertisers, TV networks, agencies, digital publishers, and large digital platforms to create a cross-media measurement solution, said ANA CEO Bob Liodice.

“I wholeheartedly welcome VAB’s and the 4A’s participation in this important project,” Liodice said in making the announcement. “Our CMM project is designed to unify stakeholders spanning the entire advertising ecosystem and the success of any cross-media measurement initiative depends on the cooperation and collaboration of each sector involved in the equation. With this move we have made a major step in achieving that goal.”

Marla Kaplowitz, 4A’s President-CEO, added: “Cross-media measurement has been a significant industry barrier for years. The 4A’s and its members are committed to the ambitions of CMM and look forward to partnering to identify solutions to better understand the effectiveness of media investments.”

VAB President-CEO Sean Cunningham said: “The VAB is extremely pleased to be joining a terrific group of top U.S. marketers in their quest for higher order cross-media measurement through the ANA’s CMM initiative. I believe 2022 and 2023 will be marked by seismic advances in sophisticated media performance metrics that give us all multi-dimensional insights on how brands grow across major video media options, and I’m convinced that real collaboration among top marketers, the media and the agencies will be the force that moves measurement mountains.”

CMM is a strategic priority for the ANA heading into 2022. Tests will continue apace throughout the year with the goal of introducing an integrated-end-to-end pilot in late 2022. The focus is on creating a transparent system of measurement that restores essential metrics of campaign measurement and provides complete measures of all ad exposures, including deduplicated reach and frequency across all platforms.

A key goal is to build a privacy-preserving infrastructure that collects first-party ad impressions and content data for measurement purposes. The objective of this approach is to preserve the privacy of audiences and related data while enabling granularity of measurement for stability and longevity as media choices evolve.