For nearly a year and a half there has been a group of industry leaders that have gotten together to tackle some of the industry’s most vexing challenges: what is the ideal media currency?, how do we prepare for the inevitability of television as a platform?, what measurement best practices should we be utilizing as an industry? It has been an awesome group of folks from all parts the ecosystem: buy side, sell side, clients, agencies, tech and media companies. It was christened the Future of Television, or FoT for short.
FoT will be reconvening in the Fall and there is no doubt that we need industry consensus now more than ever before. All of the mergers and acquisitions in the space (coupled with some new entrants) has led to competition unlike anything we have seen since the early days of the Internet. The giants are gobbling up the independents and we are seeing half a dozen media conglomerates creating new end to end tech, data and measurement stacks. Needless to say, they all have their own organizing constructs with different standards. If we don’t align on some core fundamental building blocks we will find ourselves in a world of hurt down the line. FoT will help with this, and create clarity by defining the most important issues.
I’d be curious of your opinion – what are the most important items to be solved at an industry level today? Data and privacy? Cross-screen currency? Unduplicated reach and frequency? Creative/messaging standards? Attribution? Fraud and viewability? Addressability standards?
In my mind, it all starts with currency. The fundamental building blocks upon which the business is built. It should be an audible, viewable, duration-based impression in my opinion.
What do you think?