According to recent news, coming out of the late-April Ad:Tech conference that took place in San Francisco, NBC is interested in creating a new measurement that it is calling "total audience measurement, or "TAM." I first read about it in Daisy Whitney's TelevisionWeek article, where she summarizes that "TAM measures the aggregate viewing of a show across live, same-day and online viewing."
She includes a variety of other plans in her article as well, including Visible World's technology that allows customized advertising based on the time and date of a program's airing and YuMe Networks' deal to sell ads across mobile TV content.
I wrote earlier today about the recent press regarding the gains shows get from counting DVR viewership, according to Nielsen's numbers.
However, these variety of new advertising models touted in Whitney's story are a few of myriad new ways of approaching viewers. While NBC is creating its TAM measurement, CBS has formed its CBS Connections unit, which will deal with marketing deals and advertising sales across media platforms for the broadcast company and its various online, radio, and television divisions.
Then there is the mutli-platform advertising campaigns which introduces original branded content, such as is the case with the CW Network's Smallville Legends: Justice and Doom, which I wrote about last week. The CW calls these deals "content wraps," and Toyota is the advertiser for this particular deal.
I also saw through a Daily Show parody that the ABC program World News with Charles Gibson was recently sponsored for one evening by only CVS. Jesse Noyes with the Boston Herald, points out that the deal was brokered by Hill Holliday. The episode aired on April 23.
This wide variety of new advertising formats and measurement initiatives comes at a time in which the industry is trying to become more proactive in finding ways to cope with new systems of measurement and new consumer behaviors, and also at a time where there is an increasing amount of discussion about giving some weight to viewer engagement versus simply rewarding shows for viewer impressions. It will be interesting to see which of these experimental new models will catch on and which will be remembered as failed experiments, or not remembered at all.
