True Reach® This Description of Methodology (DOM)
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Description of Methodology – True Reach® ® This Description of Methodology (DOM) is a summary of the measurement processes for True Reach employed by ® Visible Measures, including an overview of the True Reach methodology, a general description of our measurement methodology, and an outline of adverse effects on video measurement. What’s Included: ● Methodology for accumulating data ● Adverse effects on video measurement Overview Visible Measures (VMC) provides data on socially-driven online video advertising campaigns to agencies, advertisers, and the general public. The data is sourced through web sites that provide end-users the choice to watch videos. This requires five stages of activity by VMC: Site Identification, Site Configuration, Campaign Discovery, Clip Discovery, and Clip Tracking. VMC programmatically polls sites (See Appendix A for the list of sites) every day to gather key information about the individual video clips, including the total number of times each clip has been played. Analysts then use proprietary tools to group relevant clips according to advertising campaigns (specific creative assets designed to deliver a ® message to consumers, usually over a fixed period of time). True Reach is a measure of the number of times viewers have made the choice to watch clips associated with an advertising campaign. Finally Visible Measures provides this ® True Reach data via its TrueReach.org web-based tools and in custom reports delivered to clients. Advertisers and agencies care about campaigns, the directed release of advertising assets (one or many) that deliver a unified message about a particular product, service, or company. VMC identifies online video campaigns, assigns individual videos across 90+ sites and rolls up the data in order to provide campaign performance data. What methodology does Visible Measures use for accumulating video viewing data? Basics ● Visible Measures (VMC) captures video viewing data from public video publishing sites by inspecting each site’s video pages (aka scraping) and/or using APIs published by the video sites (See Appendix A for the list of sites). The scraping consists of programmatic, electronic reading of site information based on information stored in configuration files. Using the configuration information, VMC servers collect information (including clip ID, number of video plays, and comment counts where applicable) from specific HTML pages on the targeted sites. ● VMC vets all material business partners involved in the collection of socially-driven online video advertising campaigns. VMC ensures the partner is legitimate, has made viewership data public, and has a terms of service. Due to the nature of the data and the methods through which it is accessed, a limitation exists with regard to invalid traffic filtration, and VMC does not employ any invalid traffic filtration on the data collected from public video publishing sites. Site Identification ® ● In trying to assess the True Reach of online video advertising, VMC tries to monitor all the sites where substantial viewership of such content takes place. While there are hundreds of thousands of sites, the vast majority have negligible traffic and video viewership. Even some popular sites have very little video content. VMC identifies sites to monitor and scrape based on two criteria: o Site traffic and video viewership – heavily trafficked sites with an emphasis on video (YouTube, Facebook, Daily Motion) are prime targets as that is where video viewership tends to happen. o Availability of data – many sites (YouTube, Facebook, Metacafe) expose viewership data and update it regularly, allowing for rigorous data collection and analysis. Sites that keep their viewership data private (Hulu) cannot be included. ● As VMC’s team becomes aware of new sites or sites that meet the above criteria, those sites are added to the actively monitored list (Appendix A). On rare occasions a site may stop making viewership data available, and that site will then be dropped from the list. VMC could decide to stop monitoring a site due to a fall in traffic, or a negligible presence of relevant video content. Site Configuration ● VMC creates a site configuration for each video site that defines how metrics (video plays, comment counts, rating, etc.) are captured from the site. These site configurations are stored on internal servers and automatically tested twice daily to confirm their interpretation of the data formatting on tracked sites remains valid. When a site configuration fails to properly capture the desired metrics, VMC operational staff investigate the failure and adjust the configuration as needed. All automatic tests generate notification summaries describing any failures (e.g. the site is down or significantly changed its formatting) and partial successes (e.g. the site slightly changed its formatting causing only a subset of metrics to be captured). If VMC discovers that a site is consciously blocking the tracking servers a VMC representative contacts the site administrators to explain our activities and offer possible solutions. In all cases to date, the site has realized that having their traffic included in VMC’s True ® Reach data is beneficial and the blocking is disabled. If a site makes the technical and business decision to deny access, VMC will honor that decision and remove the site from the actively tracked list. Campaign Discovery ® As part of VMC’s True Reach measurement process, VMC has a set of procedures dedicated to identifying new advertising video. When a campaign is discovered, it is added to the list of tracked campaigns. This process is known as “Discovery”. After Discovery, an initial execution of searches and categorizing of placements occurs, this process is known as “Building” a campaign. The repeat execution of searches and categorizing of placements is known as “Updating” a campaign. Continuous, daily, or more frequent, collection of information on video clips that have been discovered and included in the database is known as “Tracking”. Tracking occurs for video clips even if updating no longer occurs due to thresholds not being met. Campaigns are discovered one of four ways: 1. An agency submits a campaign via an email submission 2. An analyst finds it during a weekly check of 5 advertising-focused blogs 3. An analyst finds it during daily monitoring of 23,000+ YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram brand channels 4. An analyst (or other team member) sees a campaign during routine work on one of the target sites Visible Measures focuses on branded content produced for advertising purposes. In particular, VMC focuses on marketing campaigns in which viewers have made the choice to watch associated clips. Promotional material for any clips from the following are expressly excluded: ● Award Shows ● Demo Reels ● TV Networks ● TV Shows ● Video Games ● Content Sites ● Politician's Election ads (note: VMC did include presidential ads for the 2012 election cycle) ● Music Videos that are not in and of themselves ads ● Foreign Language Content (for Social Ads) ● Compilations: if multiple ads are included in the clip it is impossible to connect viewer intent to a single campaign, so the compilation is not included in any campaign ● Product walkthroughs or demonstrations aimed more at existing users of a product than prospective users of a product Updated May 2017 Any of these may be candidates for future inclusion or expansion depending on market demands and VMC’s capabilities. Campaign Build and Update ● All clips that meet the campaign criteria above and have at least 100,000 views are organized into campaigns. This process of organization, metadata tagging, and initial Update is our “build” process. ● Following each "build," the campaign is Updated weekly for three weeks as long as either a new creative or a user-uploaded video is added during each Update. If no user uploads and/or new creatives are added during an Update, searches for new placements will terminate ● If user-uploaded videos and/or new creatives are found after the initial three week period, Updates are scheduled bi-weekly as long as either a user upload and/or new creative is added during each Update for the next five weeks. If no user uploads and/or new creatives are added during an Update, searches for new placements will terminate. ● If user-uploaded videos and/or new creatives are found after the five week period, Updates are scheduled for every four weeks as long as either a user upload and/or new creative are added during each Update for the next sixteen weeks. If no user uploads and/or new creatives are added during an Update, searches for new placements will terminate. ● If after the sixteen weeks, user uploads and/or new creatives are still being added, searches are terminated regardless. VMC systems will continue to collect daily data from all placements categorized in the database. ● If a new creative asset is discovered for a campaign during the Campaign Discovery process and that creative asset gains at least 100,000 views during the most recent three months, the campaign will be Updated Clip Discovery ● VMC dedicates a set of servers to discovering new clips (a.k.a. placements) across all supported sites. These servers are monitored at all times and include automated test suites to ensure discovery operations are functioning normally. Problems are noted in the VMC QA Dashboard and certain problems result in automatic email alerts being sent to VMC’s System Administrator and/or the Phoenix technical lead. Reporting systems track new clip yield for each site to monitor discovery rates and assist with discovery optimization (improving ability to find new clips on sites). When a new clip is discovered, it is added to the list of “tracked” clips in Phoenix. The discovery activity is divided into several types: o Normal Automated Discovery – VMC has a protocol to scan each site for new clips. This protocol is based on channels and pages relevant to advertising campaigns o Direct Search Discovery – VMC analysts define search terms that may be relevant for specific campaigns and VMC systems automatically execute those searches on a subset of sites.