Project Origin, the ISBA led local initiative, has completed the first stage of its detailed assessment of the WFA cross media measurement technical framework, announced earlier this year.
A core element of the global blueprint, the virtual ID framework has been subjected to extensive scrutiny and assessment by independent audience measurement experts RSMB across a 10-week interrogation period, with their findings now published on the Project Origin website here. These independent assessments found the proposals to be credible and worthy of further development, calling it “an elegant solution with sensible trade-offs between likely accuracy in the prediction of cross-media duplications and the practicality of the process” , going on to add that “The VID solution deserves a proof of concept evaluation in a prototype study.”
Joe Lewis, Research Lead for Project Origin outlined the significance of this work: “For a project as important and critical to the industry as Origin, it is vital the fundamentals of what we do are grounded in the highest research rigour, shown to be independent, and open to scrutiny. That is why we chose to work with independent audience measurement experts RSMB, whose experience of complex data integration solutions within audience measurement is second to none.
While an initial framework was proposed at a global level, the actual solution is being designed, owned, and built locally, with local joint industry independence across the methodology, standards and outputs.
The RSMB work has highlighted a number of key areas for us to test and evaluate as part of the next phase of proof of concept tests to ensure the resulting solution is of high integrity, as well as innovative proposals for how TV data should be integrated. There is more work to be done working collaboratively with the industry, but this is a big positive step forward.”
Benjamin S. Jankowski, Senior Vice President Media at Mastercard and project sponsor of the WFA cross media measurement initiative commented: “As global marketers, we’ve identified what it is we want and brought the industry together to develop a true cross media measurement solution. This is a massively complex task and taken a huge effort to develop a technical framework. Now it is fantastic to see local initiatives, starting in the UK and the US, bring this to reality in the marketplace. The work done by RSMB within Project Origin is highly encouraging and sets a path to developing a potential framework that can not only work for the UK, but also potentially be scaled globally across markets. This is a major milestone and we look forward to continue to work with ISBA and the Project Origin team as part of their next phase of developments.”
Katharine Newby Grant, VP, Beauty Care, Northern Europe at Procter & Gamble said: “As a key supporter of Project Origin, it is welcoming and reassuring to see the progress being made in the UK off the back of global proposals. The RSMB evaluation is the first step towards building an independent, locally managed and run, cross media measurement service and we call on the industry to step up its collaboration under the Origin umbrella in the next phase of work to progress even faster.“
Project Origin plans a nine-month test, pilot, and evaluation phase in 2021, taking on board key aspects of the RSMB work whilst also building and evaluating other key measurement input and output components.
