Industry Insights: Closing the gaps in cross-platform audience measurement

As audiences move between traditional broadcast, streaming, FAST channels and connected TV, media organizations face growing pressure to understand not just who is watching, but how viewers engage with content and advertising across platforms.

The expansion of audience data creates new opportunities for targeting, measurement and optimization, but also introduces challenges around fragmented systems, inconsistent metrics and disconnected viewer identities.

Turning that information into actionable intelligence requires more than collecting additional data.

In part one of this two-part Industry Insights roundtable, industry vendors examine the evolving expectations for audience measurement, the gaps between available data and business decisions, and the technical challenges of building a consistent view of viewers across platforms. The discussion also explores emerging measurement standards and the importance of connecting audience insights with advertising performance, content strategy and viewer experience.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Fragmented measurement systems: Differences in data collection, audience identification and reporting across linear TV, streaming and connected TV make it difficult to establish a consistent view of audience behavior and campaign performance.
• Data without decisions: Media organizations increasingly collect detailed audience information but struggle to translate it into actionable insights because of disconnected systems, inconsistent definitions and organizational silos.
• Identity remains critical: Reliable audience matching across platforms is essential for understanding duplicated impressions, incremental reach and campaign effectiveness, particularly as viewers move between traditional and digital environments.
• Ad verification challenges: Measuring whether advertisements were actually viewed rather than simply delivered requires more consistent client-side signals, standardized reporting and interoperability across devices and distribution platforms.
• Standards are evolving: Emerging approaches such as SVTA Ad Creative Signaling and CMCDv2 aim to improve measurement consistency, particularly in third-party streaming environments where broadcasters have limited control over playback technology.

How have customer expectations around audience intelligence changed as viewing has expanded across broadcast, streaming, FAST and connected TV?

Gerrit Niemeijer, CTO, Ampersand: Advertiser expectations have shifted from basic demographic delivery toward greater accountability across the full TV ecosystem. Marketers want to understand not only how many people a campaign reached, but which audiences were reached, how often, and whether those impressions delivered incremental reach or meaningful outcomes. As viewing continues to move between broadcast, streaming, FAST and connected TV, advertisers increasingly need a unified view of performance rather than separate scorecards for each platform.

Mark Paramor, director of operations assurance, Accedo: We now have a much deeper understanding of audiences than was possible with traditional linear TV. Streaming platforms and CTVs enable far greater visibility into how viewers discover content, as well as what they watch, and when they watch it, along with how they engage with ads. As a result, broadcasters’ and service providers’ expectations around viewer data and insights have grown significantly. However, at the same time, viewing has also become highly fragmented with viewers moving between services, platforms and devices and this makes it harder to build a consistent picture of what is driving engagement and how viewers are behaving.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: Advertisers expect richer and more accurate measurement that goes beyond the basic delivery metrics available in traditional linear broadcasting. Viewability is key to meeting these expectations and remains the closest we can get to knowing whether someone truly watched an ad. It can tell us whether an ad was actually on-screen, for how long, whether it was obstructed, and whether the sound was on, with the IAB Open Measurement SDK providing a standardized way to capture those signals across platforms. As viewing fragments across devices, verified and consistent measurement is becoming fundamental to proving the value of streaming inventory. When advertisers trust the data, they can invest more confidently, renew campaigns and experiment with new formats.

Where do you see the greatest disconnect between the audience data organizations collect and the decisions they are able to make from it?

Gerrit Niemeijer, CTO, Ampersand: Many organizations collect great audience data. But that data can only be used for media planning and analysis if there are strong identity signals that can match it with media consumption data. When the signals are weak and non-deterministic, any media planning and activation is going to be incredibly imprecise, and any media analysis is going to be of questionable value. This situation compounds even more if there is a lack of identity matching between linear TV, streaming and CTV.

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Mark Paramor, director of operations assurance, Accedo: While video providers have more data at their disposal than ever before in the history of the TV industry, a lot of providers still lack the tools and cross-team alignment needed to turn data into service improvements that actually move the lever. Customer data is all too often sitting in separate silos across product, marketing and operational teams and without a more unified approach, it’s difficult to see what impact different decisions have on viewers’ experience. What’s missing is a genuinely unified, cross-surface view of a viewer’s experience, which makes it hard to measure and even harder to act on user data, particularly when it extends across broadcast, streaming and social spaces pretty much concurrently.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: The disconnect is often between knowing that an ad was delivered and knowing what the viewer actually experienced. SSAI and SGAI solutions can be accompanied by measurement SDKs, but decisions about campaign performance and monetization ultimately require client-side signals confirming whether the ad played and how it was experienced. The challenge is capturing that richer client data consistently across a highly fragmented streaming audience. Different devices have different requirements, sometimes even from the same manufacturer, creating potential gaps in reporting accuracy and ultimately revenue recognition. SVTA Ad Creative Signaling and CMCDv2 for Client-Guided Tracking address this in complementary ways, combining rich client-aware measurement with greater resilience where client support is limited.

Josh Heller, chief revenue officer, Coactive: Every translation step in the supply chain strips away meaning. The advertiser speaks in moods, the DSP speaks in keywords, the publisher speaks in genres, so the brief arrives at the inventory with the intent already gone. Organizations are not short of audience data, they are losing the question on the way to the answer.

Peter Nummerdor, SVP, product management, VideoAmp: The industry has access to more audience data than ever, but having more data does not automatically create better decisions. The disconnect often comes when data lives across different systems, uses different definitions or arrives too late to influence what happens next. The opportunity is to create a shared foundation where audience intelligence is proactive and real time, that it can inform planning, optimization and measurement rather than functioning primarily as a retrospective report.

What audience measurement and analytics challenges are broadcasters and media organizations asking your company to solve today?

Reinhard Grandl, chief product officer, Bitmovin: One common issue we come across is that data is split across systems that can’t easily communicate and that don’t necessarily agree with each other. The CDN knows what was delivered, but only the player knows what actually happened during playback, and then the measurement vendor may report something else, so it’s really difficult to reconcile the three.

What’s needed is one version of the viewing session that both the engineering team and the content team will accept so that playback errors are easier to interpret, investigate and address. This is a key focus area for us (we see it from the inside): what was encoded, what was delivered, and what the viewer actually experienced. Conversations that used to be purely about audience need to be broadened around quality-of-experience and ad intelligence data. With solutions such as Bitmovin’s Observability with AI Session Interpreter, users can easily analyze every viewer session and get unified, clear and actionable insights and recommendations that can be used to optimize performance and enhance viewer experience.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: Measuring ads across a varied landscape of device types is a major challenge. With server-side ad insertion (SSAI) and server-guided ad insertion (SGAI), the player doesn’t interact directly with the ad server and isn’t necessarily aware of what’s playing in the stream. Differences across CTVs, mobile devices, web players, and streaming protocols add further complexity. Broadcasters need measurement that accurately reflects what happens on the client side, at scale, so they can prove an ad was actually played rather than simply delivered. This is a critical requirement in achieving IAB certification.

Best practice is to accompany SSAI or SGAI with a client-based SDK, though this is only possible when the broadcaster has control of the player environment. Two emerging standards — SVTA Ad Creative Signaling and CTA’s latest iteration of Common Media Client Data (CMCDv2) for Client-Guided Tracking — aim to bring the accuracy of client-side measurement to third-party distribution and syndication where control of the player is not guaranteed.

Josh Heller, chief revenue officer, Coactive: They ask us to close what I call the advertiser-intent gap: the distance between what a buyer wants and what a library can verifiably deliver. A brand briefs in moods, not category codes. Six weeks of creative strategy produces “joyful family gatherings” and the system answers with three words: “cooking and food.”

Peter Nummerdor, SVP, product management, VideoAmp: The biggest challenge is no longer simply measuring top of funnel. Media organizations are trying to understand audience behavior across linear, streaming and digital environments that have idiosyncratic data and varying identity coverage. It’s about turning reactive measurement into proactive decisions they can actually act on now. Increasingly, the ask is for measurement that connects reach and frequency with outcomes so teams can understand not just where audiences are, but what media is driving behaviorally.

What separates an effective audience intelligence strategy from a collection of disconnected analytics tools?

Peter Nummerdor, SVP, product management, VideoAmp: An effective strategy starts with a consistent view of the funnel rather than asking teams to reconcile different insights from different tools. Identity, data and measurement need to work off a shared lens from campaign start to finish so that the insights generated during planning can carry through activation, optimization and measurement. Otherwise, organizations can spend more time reconciling their analytics than acting on them.

What makes cross-platform audience measurement particularly difficult for broadcasters and content owners?

Gerrit Niemeijer, CTO, Ampersand: The industry is working across two very different measurement environments. Traditional linear TV relies heavily on panel-based measurement and MVPD set-top box data, while streaming and CTV rely on 1P/3P impression-level data with device IDs, IP addresses or other identity signals. Bridging these two environments is challenging, which makes it difficult to build a unified view of the audience across linear TV and CTV/streaming, which makes it hard to plan and measure cross-screen campaigns.

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Peter Nummerdor, SVP, product management, VideoAmp: Audiences don’t think in terms of linear, CTV or digital, but measurement systems historically have. Each environment produces different signals, levels of granularity and identifiers, which makes it difficult to understand duplication and incremental reach across platforms. Solving that requires complex methodology to connect those signals accurately enough that organizations can compare performance and make decisions across channels. This is a full stack problem from normalizing the audience, exposures and conversions to ensure projection to census is always statistically apples to apples.

How can organizations create a more consistent view of audience behavior across linear channels, owned streaming platforms and third-party distribution services?

Mark Paramor, director of operations assurance, Accedo: For a more complete picture of viewer behavior, video services need to unify data across all of the different touch-points that form the customer journey. Once a service provider has greater visibility, they can better understand what is working and conversely what isn’t. Then it becomes possible to make data-driven decisions on where to make improvements that make the most difference and that result in the required outcomes. What’s become crucially important is that these decisions and change itself, is executed quickly, yet a provider’s ability to do this is dependent on the degree to which a service’s capabilities can be configured, adjusted and orchestrated in runtime. With the right kind of flexible, composable platform, decision and development cycles can be compressed from months and weeks as would have been required for an app release or an engineering project, to hours and minutes.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: Consistency starts with standardization, rather than building a different measurement approach for every platform. This begins with the IAB’s Open Measurement standards, which address advertisers’ needs. In response, bespoke client-side SDKs have been providing deep viewability data. Industry-wide initiatives such as SVTA Ad Creative Signaling and CTA’s CMCDv2 for Client-Guided Tracking are creating a common language for communicating what happened during playback, enabling more consistent interpretation of measurement data from owned players and third-party environments. That becomes particularly important in scenarios where content is distributed into environments where the broadcaster has less direct control over the player.

Josh Heller, chief revenue officer, Coactive: Identity does not fully reconcile across linear, owned platforms and third-party distribution, because the data rights and delivery mechanics are different in each. The content itself is the one thing that travels intact, so make the content the common key: index it once, consistently, and let the different audience datasets attach to it. You get a consistent view of what performed even where you cannot get one of who watched.

Are current measurement standards keeping pace with the way audiences consume content across platforms?

Gerrit Niemeijer, CTO, Ampersand: Measurement standards have not fully caught up with the way audiences consume TV today. Traditional measurement was built around individual media environments, but viewers now consume TV content from linear TV, streaming and CTV interchangeably, making it difficult for marketers to get a true picture of total audience delivery across channels. Without a reliable cross-channel identity spine, marketers will struggle to determine whether streaming is actually reaching new households or simply reaching the same households they already reached through linear TV for example.

Paul Davies, head of marketing, Yospace: Client-side SDKs that meet the IAB’s Open Measurement certification requirements can capture the data advertisers need. On top of that, standards like SVTA Ad Creative Signaling and CTA’s latest iteration of CMCDv2 are addressing different parts of the measurement challenge. SVTA enables rich, client-aware measurement by providing standardized ad metadata to the player, while CMCDv2 communicates playback state back to a measurement endpoint, offering greater consistency where direct client support is limited. The two approaches are complementary and give the industry a path towards more scalable measurement across increasingly fragmented viewing environments.