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358 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH December 2015 DOI: 10.2501/JAR-2015-019
INTRODUCTION
Over the past 15 years, U.S. spending on digital
advertising has surged, growing sixfold to reach
$49.5 billion in 2014.1 Magna Global forecasts that
digital will exceed television advertising by the
end of 2016.2
Such growth, along with a plethora of computer-
driven measures, have caused some industry
observers3 to suggest that traditional metrics—
specifically, the gross rating point (GRP)—are no
longer relevant and should be replaced.
The GRP measures reach multiplied by fre-
quency. It is a metric that has long been used within
(and across) the traditional platforms of television,
radio, and print to gauge how much advertising
“pressure” is being delivered.
But is the GRP really dead in a digital world?
MEASURING REACH IN THE DIGITAL
MARKETPLACE
Those who insist that the GRP is only appropriate to
an earlier era of measurement misunderstand two
fundamentals of how digital advertising works:
• The first mistake assumes that, since digital
advertisements can be targeted to the desired
audience, actual delivered reach against target is
100 percent accurate, rendering the reach compo-
nent of the GRP obsolete.
In fact, although digital targeting is more pre-
cise than traditional media, it relies largely on
cookies and is far from perfect. Because of cookie
deletion, ad servers often may overstate reach
and understate frequency. The descriptive data
1 “IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report 2015.” Retrieved October
15, 2015 at http://www.iab.net/research/industry_data_and_landscape/
adrevenuereport
2 “Magna Global Perspective on US Digital Media.” (Webinar).
Retrieved October 15, 2015 at http://www.iab.net/media/file/MAGNA_
Letang_IAB_Webinar_042215.pdf
appended to cookies also can be out of date or
erroneous, leading to further inaccuracies.
In effect, actual reach and frequency for digi-
tal campaigns often is quite different from what
originally was planned and needs to be measured
via means other than through ad-server metrics.3
• The second critique is that digital inherently
measures consumers’ engagement with adver-
tising (“clicks” on advertisements are the most-
often cited such metric). So why use the GRP, the
argument goes, when one can use behavioral
response metrics?
While incorrectly viewing the GRP as a meas-
ure of effectiveness, this complaint also fails to
acknowledge prior research that has shown that
the click bears no relationship to the effectiveness
of digital advertising (Fulgoni and Morn, 2009).
There are even more compelling arguments for
the continued use of the GRP. We live in a digital
world. And for cross-platform campaigns, GRPs—
and targeted GRPs—remain extremely import-
ant metrics in understanding what was delivered
across platforms. In particular,
• The reach component of the GRP should measure
the actual unduplicated audience that received at
least one in-view advertising impression across
the various platforms used;
• The frequency component should show the aver-
age number of in-view advertising impressions
delivered per unduplicated person reached.
Because the various platforms generally see dif-
fering rates of use by different demographic
3 “Measuring Brand Effectiveness: Should We Kill the Digital GRP?”
Make Good, August 13, 2012. Retrieved August 21, 2015 from the-
makegood.com website: http://www.the-makegood.com/2012/08/13/
measuring-brand-effectiveness-should-we-kill-the-digital-grp/
Is the GRP Really Dead
In a Cross-Platform Ecosystem?
Why the Gross Rating Point Metric
Should Thrive in Today’s Fragmented Media World
GIAN M. FULGONI
comScore, Inc.
gfulgoni@comscore.com
Numbers,
Please
December 2015 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 359
IS THE GRP REALLY DEAD IN A CROSS-PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM? THEARF.ORG
segments, targeted GRPs are even more
important when trying to ascertain
whether a cross-platform campaign has
been successful in cumulatively reaching
its intended targets.
Why Measuring Reach in a
Cross-Platform TV World Matters
Television content can be viewed in mul-
tiple ways today—both in terms of plat-
forms and viewing devices—all of which
are designed to provide the viewer with
maximum flexibility and convenience.
There’s live and time-delayed viewing on
a television set, desktop computer, smart-
phone, tablet, gaming console, and/or
streaming video device. One has the choice
of cable, satellite, or over-the-air reception
along with video on demand or the use of
a digital video recorder.
There is a number of Internet-based
options to view live or time-delayed con-
tent. Most important among these is over-
the-top (OTT) viewing, which is watching
television content streamed from the Inter-
net (think Hulu, Netflix, etc.) to a digital
device (computer, tablet, or smartphone)
or to a television set using a device such as
Apple TV, Roku, or Amazon Fire.
With all these options available, how-
ever, one major uncertainty remains: How
much video content will the networks
and studios make available in real time
on each medium? The concern is driven
by the economics of the current cable
and satellite distribution systems that
involve massive payments (well north of
$30 billion annually) to the content own-
ers in exchange for rights to distribute the
content.4 The magnitude of these affiliate
fees makes the content owners hesitant to
stream their content directly to consumers
4 “When It Comes to Television Content, Affiliate
Fees Make the World Go ‘Round,’” Above the Crowd
by Bill Gurley, April 28, 2010. Retrieved August
21, 2015 at http://abovethecrowd.com/2010/04/28/
affiliate-fees-make-the-world-go-round/
through the Internet for fear of damaging
these lucrative payments.
Nonetheless, with an increasing number
of consumers—small though the number
may still be—willing to “cut the cord” and
drop their subscriptions to cable or satel-
lite TV packages5 for selective OTT pur-
chases, some content providers (among
them HBO, CBS, and ESPN) have been
willing to offer small bundles of OTT sub-
scription packages directly to consumers.
Their hope seems to be, on the one hand,
realizing some revenue from the cord
cutters and, on the other, not threatening
their larger revenue streams by limiting the
extent of cord cutting.
In this fragmented, fast-changing eco-
system, the ability of media planners to
understand audiences across the various
viewing alternatives becomes critical. In
early 2015, Irwin Gotlieb, chairman of
WPP’s GroupM agency (the world’s larg-
est media-investment group), insisted that
harmonizing media planning and buying
across platforms requires, among other
things, new data on viewing behavior that
measures cumulative unduplicated audi-
ences at a granular level across all combi-
nations of platforms.6
The challenges in producing such data
are daunting, but are now beginning to be
met. For example, to measure at the level
of granularity needed, databases must
measure the behavior of millions of peo-
ple, dwarfing the tens of thousands histori-
cally used in television-viewing research.
Although samples of limited size still will
be necessary to obtain person-level demo-
graphic data, such research data alone will
simply not stand up to the needs of cross-
platform measurement at the campaign and
device level. Limited samples need to be
integrated with “census” data covering the
5 “Cord-Cutting Ramps Up as Pay TV Sees Record Sub-
scriber Losses,” AdAge.com, August 13, 2015. Retrieved
August 21, 2015 at http://adage.com/article/media/cord-cut-
ting-booms-pay-tv-sees-record-subscriber-losses/299963/
viewing of television content on millions of
television set top boxes and digital devices.
It’s also no longer sufficient to have only
audience data for each individual plat-
form. As GroupM’s Gotlieb noted, a lack
of data that shows how audiences’ build
across platforms has hindered the ability of
media planners to design campaigns that
incorporate both digital and traditional tel-
evision platforms in a holistic fashion.
That failing likely has had the effect of
dampening advertising spending on both
platforms because, in the absence of such
data, media planners don’t have the confi-
dence—let alone the justification—to make
the necessary investments.6
There likely will be an increase in adver-
tising spending—including on television
content—as cross-platform GRP data
become available to improve the ability of
advertisers, first to measure consumers’
use of each platform at the television-show
level, and then to understand cumulative
reach and frequency across platforms.
In fact, it’s quite likely that such GRP
data will allow planners to design power-
ful cross-media campaigns that successfully
build sales. This can occur in a variety of
ways that should appeal to advertisers:
• With cross-platform audience data,
advertising campaigns can be designed
to more efficiently reach the viewers of
specific television content across various
platforms, while also delivering optimal
frequencies.
• Broadcasters and cable networks can
offer packaged advertising plans that
are based on a clearer understanding
of which platforms are the most appro-
priate to use to reach demographic seg-
ments that watch their television content
at different times of the day.
6 “Irwin Gotlieb to Les Moonves: Not So Fast on Cross
Device TV Advertising,” Beet.TV.com, January 16, 2015.
Retrieved August 21, 2015 at http://www.beet.tv/2015/01/
irwin-gotlieb.html
360 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH December 2015
IS THE GRP REALLY DEAD IN A CROSS-PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM?
Audience Reach and “Over-the-Top”
TV Viewing
The rapid, sudden growth of Netflix was
the first evidence of the potential popu-
larity of OTT viewing. Most third-party,
video-content providers, however, have
been careful to not license first-run content
to Netflix, lest they threaten the lucrative
affiliate fees they receive from cable and
satellite distributors.
The compromise seemed reasonable.
But determining the price to be paid to
license the content has become a disrup-
tive issue. Netflix is not an advertisement-
supported distributor but, instead, pays
the video-content owners a licensing fee
and recoups this cost by charging con-
sumers a subscription fee. In negotiating
the licensing fee, Netflix knows the size
of the audience for each piece of content
viewed on its platform but chooses not
to share this information with the con-
tent owners. In the absence of third-party
audience research data, Netflix enjoys an
advantageous position.
Media research companies—comScore
and Nielsen among them—plan to offer
new cross-platform measurement systems
that will provide syndicated audience data
for content viewed on Netflix. But, for the
moment, the playing field between buyers
and sellers in licensing remains muddled.
And it won’t get any less complicated.
As mentioned earlier, OTT viewing is a
particularly vexing challenge for content
owners, but the attractiveness of OTT
viewing can’t be disputed.
Hulu, in particular, offers a strong
example of the power of OTT in build-
ing incremental reach and why GRP
data are needed across devices: At the
Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)
2015 Audience Measurement conference,
Hulu showed that 25.8 million consumers
viewed its digital-video content in March
2015 (ARF, 2015b). OTT viewing on a tele-
vision set, in fact, accounted for more than
50 percent of all digital video views in the
Hulu study (See Figure 1).
It’s easy to see the importance of a
multi-platform GRP in OTT viewing of
television content. In its absence, media
planners simply don’t have the informa-
tion they need to understand what reach
and frequency their campaigns are obtain-
ing or the total advertising pressure they
are delivering.
Measuring TV Reach through Young
Digital Audiences
Nielsen (2015b) reported that total time
spent watching television (live plus time-
delayed audiences) declined only margin-
ally from Q1 2013 to Q1 2015. At the same
time, over the past three years, Internet
usage has more than doubled (Fulgoni,
2015b) to become equivalent to approxi-
mately 70 percent of the time spent watch-
ing television (Fulgoni, 2015a).
It is important to note, however, there
is no evidence that, in total, the Internet is
cannibalizing television viewing. Rather,
overall consumption of media content is
increasing (ARF, 2015a). But, the televi-
sion viewing behavior of young viewers is
changing in fundamental ways.
When examining the Nielsen (2015a)
data by demographic segment, it becomes
clear that younger millennials today are
watching far less linear television than
their peer groups did in previous years.
In the four years through Q1 2015, time
spent watching live or time-shifted
Source: comScore Hulu Total Audience Report, March 2015
Total
Audience
Plus
Co-Viewing
Plus
OTT TV
Plus
Mobile
% Share of
Videos
Desktop
30
12.6 MM
Incremental
unique
viewers, or
nearly half
of Hulu’s
Total
Audience
25
20
15
10
5
0
Unique Viewers 000
13.2
25.8 MM
6.3
4.5 1.8
Hulu’s audience grew by 95% beyond the desktop by measuring
mobile and OTT TV with co-viewing.
Desktop
34%
Mobile
12%
OTT TV
54%
Figure 1 Hulu Mobile and OTT Unduplicated Audience Growth
In March 2015
When examining the Nielsen (2015a) data by
demographic segment, it becomes clear that younger
millennials today are watching far less linear television
than their peer groups did in previous years.
December 2015 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 361
IS THE GRP REALLY DEAD IN A CROSS-PLATFORM ECOSYSTEM? THEARF.ORG
television by 18- to 24-year-olds dropped
by a staggering 30 percent. This factor
obviously poses a challenge for advertis-
ers trying to reach younger age segments
with television advertisements.
With the availability of cross-platform
data, however, it’s becoming clear that
digital video is a solution because it can
be used as a powerful complement to tel-
evision to reach those younger viewers
who are much more likely than their older
counterparts to watch videos on a digital
device. One study, in fact, showed that
digital use increased ESPN’s daily undu-
plicated reach among men age 18 years
or older by 21 percent over what could be
achieved using television alone.7
What was really striking, moreover, was
that digital increased ESPN’s unduplicated
reach by 37 percent among the age 18-to-34
segment, compared with a much lower
15-percent increase among people age 55
years or older.
With traditional linear television view-
ing likely to experience ongoing declines,
providing insight using GRP data into the
size of the incremental audiences that view
television content through digital allows
broadcasters and cable networks to estab-
lish that their audiences are simply shifting
and not leaving altogether.
Cross-platform GRP data also allows
them to establish a better value proposi-
tion to advertisers by proving their abil-
ity to build reach more efficiently through
their combined cross-platform audiences—
rather than the slower, more costly reach
builds that are achieved when campaigns
are planned in individual platform silos.
CONCLUSION
Driven by rapid advances in technology,
it’s clear that consumers’ consumption of
7 TV & Digital Video Everywhere: Measuring Multi-Plat-
form, Time-shifted Video Viewing. Retrieved August 21,
2015 at https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Data-Mine/
Measuring-Multi-Platform-Time-shifted-Video-Viewing
television content has fragmented in ways
unimaginable just a few short years ago.
This change has presented some daunt-
ing challenges in cross-platform audience
measurement that are only now begin-
ning to be resolved by a new generation of
measurement services.
With all of these changes, however,
media researchers can expect the GRP to
become even more important. In particu-
lar, reach and frequency—the underlying
components of the GRP—will be vital in
the measurement of unduplicated reach
and frequency across platforms and not
just within individual media silos.
As the new GRP data emerge, advertis-
ers can leverage today’s viewing behaviors
to better impact consumer choice in pow-
erful ways. Specifically,
• New GRP data will provide media
planners with the reach and frequency
information they need to more confi-
dently invest in cross-platform advertis-
ing campaigns. This can be expected to
increase spending across both traditional
television and digital platforms.
• New data also will permit the design
of cross-platform campaigns that more
efficiently and effectively reach target
audiences. This advance is especially
important in light of the ways in which
millennials’ behavior is shifting from live
television viewing to the use of multi-
ple devices to view video content that is
streamed to them over the Internet.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gian M. FulGoni is co-founder and chairman emeritus
of comScore, Inc. Previously he was president/ceo of
Information Resources, Inc. During a 40-year career
at the c-level of corporate management, Fulgoni
has overseen the development of many innovative
technological methods of measuring consumer behavior
and advertising effectiveness. He is a regular contributor
to the Journal of Advertising Resear ch.
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ARF. (2015a, June). “ESPN Spotlight Session”
[Video file]. Advertising Research Foundation
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