Tom Gennari, CEO of BB Media and Pablo Verdenelli, Chief Executive Officer of Seenka
BB Media Day Argentina shared, as usual, insights and trends about the media and entertainment industry, but this time they also launched Audiencias Latinoamérica, a project external to BB Media and in partnership with other companies, providing an audience measurement service based on current methodologies and primary data from video providers and streamers.
Tom Gennari, CEO of BB Media, pointed out that currently in the market “there is still insistence on measuring with meters, a system that is already 60 years old, limited, and not certified by the Media Rating Council (MRC) of the USA. Sample sizes are insufficient and cover few cities, in addition to still using outdated methodologies. Many mention ACR (Audio Content Recognition) which recognizes content or video, but it’s not something new, and although it works, it doesn’t solve the problems.”
He also emphasized that to date, measuring what users do with screens outside the home has not been achieved, and meters do not measure OTT. “Today in Argentina, 13% of households have only pay TV, 49% have pay TV and some platform, and 16% have only OTT. And the meters are not measuring that 49% and 16%. The current methodology is not covering what is needed,” Gennari stressed.
In this context, Audiencias Latinoamérica works with primary data that covers all users, anonymized and deduplicated data coming from the primary source, audited and certified, which is combined with secondary data (Digital i, SODA), and integrated with partners (Seanka), providing transparency and cost reduction.
“The integration with other data sources from partners like Zeenka and Digital i is fundamental. And all raw data will always be integrated with the rest of BB Media’s services, even though they are separate companies,” Gennari explained.
Pablo Verdenelli, Chief Executive Officer of Seenka, a technology company that monitors advertising, emphasized that although there is a lot of data in the market, marketing teams do not use it to make money.
“When Tomás (Gennari) and I decided to merge the companies to integrate the data, it was because we see that as one of the major barriers that media companies and agencies face, they need providers to integrate the data, they lose money, time, and the data arrives late (…) The data has to arrive already integrated into the company so that it doesn’t have to invest neither time nor money in hiring staff to do the work,” added Verdenelli.
The idea is for the data to serve to improve performance, save time, budget, and detect trends to make precise decisions. The question is how to improve sales or the performance of a company and, from there, connect with real-time data that provides information for the desired objective.
For her part, Rosario Bull, Chief Customer Officer of BB Media, highlighted that Audiencias Latinoamérica is bringing a new currency to the industry that responds to the need to establish new foundations.
The need to measure streaming was also at the center of the presentation of BB Media Day entitled “Behind the Scenes: From Pay TV to Streaming, from Theory to Real Measurement”, where Luciano Zarlenga, Chief Analytics Officer, and Managing Director, and Tomás Curone, Chief Operating Officer, reported that in Latin America, 67% of households are subscribed to both pay TV and some OTT. “Not measuring streaming means not measuring 197 million households.”
They also highlighted the relevance of the passive data collection method, which does not require the active participation of users and presents advantages such as data anonymization, the possibility of minute-by-minute, geographical, by-account, and by-device openings, as well as the analysis of the total grid of open, paid, and premium TV, VOD catalog, and metadata.
