ISBA’s cross-media measurement tool Origin is entering the next phase of its trials, with 35 advertisers set to test real campaign data for the first time.

So far, 10 advertisers have begun the onboarding process for the beta trials, and the remaining 25 will be integrated onto the platform over the next few months.

More than 50 users from across the 10 advertisers and their agencies will be able to use the Origin platform to measure deduplicated cross-media reach and frequency levels across their ad campaigns in what it says is a “media-first globally”.

Tesco is one of the first 10 advertisers to join the beta trials. It has been a funding partner since the start of the project in 2019, with the supermarket’s head of media and campaign planning, Tom Mardon, saying its key motivation for joining the project was to understand what channels drive the “most cost-effective reach” and assess audience behaviour across channels.

“The promise of Origin is that it connects to more of the ecosystem,” he tells Marketing Week.

Media is such a core part of our business, and it’s such a large part of our P&L that my superiors quite rightly expect me to bring them things that are forensic and optimised.

Gareth George, Confused.com

Origin feeds multiple measurement tools into one dataset to help advertisers plan, track and evaluate campaigns across YouTube, Meta and linear TV. It claims advertisers will be able to measure their ad campaigns across TV, digital video and digital display, which accounts for over 70% of all UK media spend, excluding paid search.

ISBA’s director general Phil Smith tells Marketing Week that Origin will help advertisers “drive the use cases that show a return on investment” so they can “make efficiencies” in the way they allocate media and how they reinvest money.

The beta trials follow the alpha trials, which marked the first usage of the Origin platform. These trials ran through the second half of 2023 with five major advertisers: L’Oréal, EE, PepsiCo, P&G, and Unilever. They used synthetic campaign data to test the product’s user interface and experience.

Following the beta trials, Origin will transition into a short pilot trial stage, with more advertisers and media owners being integrated onto the platform. Following the pilot phase, the Origin platform will be available to the whole market, with the launch of the Origin v1 product planned for early 2025.

Advertiser reactions

Confused.com joined the project three years ago. The brand’s group head of media, Gareth George, says: “In a world where cross-media single source measurement has not evolved with the market, the strides taken by Origin represent a platform from which the industry can build more transparency and accountability when it comes to their media campaigns.”.

Virgin Media O2 has been involved in the project for just over two years. “It’s been a huge gap in everyone’s knowledge – the fact that there haven’t been any research tools out there to do what Origin will be able to do,” says VMO2’s former head of media Neil Harrison.

Earlier this year, Boots CMO Pete Markey was appointed to ISBA president and expressed that the retailer is “very pleased” to be joining Origin, noting that the tool will “transform the effectiveness and efficiency” of Boot’s advertising activity.

“It’s been a long, incredibly difficult road to get here. True cross-media measurement was something some people said was impossible and while we have disproved that theory there were times when I think some of the team felt they may have bitten off more than they could chew,” he said during his acceptance speech.

Broadcaster resistance

The Origin platform will use its own 2,500 household panel, built by Kantar and using Kantar’s Focal Meter to capture digital device viewing information to source linear TV campaign audience data, it says.

It claims the Origin panel will surface “never before available” second-by-second linear TV viewing data, which will allow “true like-for-like granular comparison of ad viewing duration across TV and online”.

Since its beginning, the project has been met with some resistance, particularly from traditional broadcast TV providers. Sky, ITV, Channel 4, and TV audience measurement board BARB have yet to feed their own on-demand and linear data into Origin.

At a Thinkbox event earlier this month, ITV’s commercial managing director Kelly Williams revealed the broadcasters’ fear that Origin will be biased towards digital platforms and its inability to measure “apples with apples”.

“We’ve been having very constructive conversations with Origin over the last few years,” he said. “But the way they are developing Origin, we’ve got a few issues with.”

He outlined two “thorny” issues TV broadcasters currently have with Origin. “At the moment, Origin is proposing that you can pair a completed view on television with a two-second view on YouTube, and for us, that just doesn’t feel right,” he said.

Secondly, Kelly claimed that Origin is proposing that broadcasters “wouldn’t get access to the data that comes out the other end”.

“We feel that we should be able to see the value TV brings overall.”

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However, ISBA’s director general, Phil Smith, believes Origin will enable advertisers to make “apples with apples comparisons and apples with pears comparisons”.

“That means that people will be able to get a better indication of the value of TV.”

George says it’s “disappointing” that the broadcasters aren’t on board yet, but argues there will be “advertiser pressure” for them to eventually come on board. This sentiment is echoed by Markey who believes “as things evolve and move, they’re probably going to need to [join] for everyone’s benefit”.

“I don’t think it hampers things by us not having everything because there’s so much benefit in the other bits,” he adds.

Earlier this month, the three broadcasters announced the launch of Lantern, a collaborative TV measurement panel designed to allow advertisers to measure TV’s impact on campaigns.

Smith says the tool “could prove useful” to marketers. However, comparisons to Origin are “misguided” as they seek to do different things.

“Origin was created to give advertisers a rich and accountable source of data, combining panel and first-party data in a privacy-safe way to allow them to make better decisions across all their media spend,” he explains.

Data for the boardroom

Mardon says the hope with Origin is it “reinvigorates the craft of media planning” as it will allow marketers to see the most effective channels to reach their audience, and therefore, the media plan and creative may be optimised to suit the specific audience.

He explains that if Origin finds 50% of reach is driven by a six-second ad on YouTube, advertisers might “think harder” about the creative for a short format compared to a 30-second linear ad.

“I think it will help rebalance efforts,” he explains.

As brands have the option of inputting their own KPIs, Harrison also foresees an impact on campaign creative. For example, triallists can choose whether the report tracks a full view or partial view of a video. Harrison says that advertisers who are less concerned with the full view may steer the creative in a different direction.

However, for VMO2, Harrison says it wants to measure against the completed view because “that’s where you get the full value of the creative”.

Advertisers noted that a key benefit of Origin will be its ability to allow more access to data to take to the wider business.

George says it’s an “exposing situation” heading into the C-Suite without exact data, and for the past 10 years, it’s felt like “bringing a knife to a gunfight”.

Origin will hopefully reinvigorate the craft of media planning.

Tom Marden, Tesco

Before Origin, he says measuring across platforms took a lot of guesswork.

“You haven’t got an exact science, you haven’t got precise forecasts, you’ve got a lot of various bits either in silos or various planning tools,” he explains.

“That’s quite exposing because media is such a core part of our business, and it’s such a large part of our P&L that my superiors quite rightly expect me to bring them things that are forensic and optimised.”

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Markey agrees and hopes Origin will “strengthen” the case for marketing in the boardroom.

“The ambition for Origin is to be a powerful tool for agencies and brands that means you can use your budget more effectively and efficiently,” he explains.

“That has a lovely set of knock-on benefits, including better conversations in boardrooms and with your teams around more confidence in how you’re measuring things, how confident you are as a marketer to say marketing is an investment, not a cost.”

George is most excited about accurate coverage and reach data. He believes this will allow advertisers to have “full end-to-end coverage”, which will help inform where to spend the “next most effective pound”.

“If I can get to the stage where I can build that, then we can sharpen our media planning to be as precise as possible and make sure that we’re spending money with the right fiscal responsibility that we should be,” he adds.

Funding

Development of the Origin platform is being funded via industry-wide collaboration. Brand owners, media owners and the media agency community have come together as funding stakeholders. Once launched, the service will be funded by users paying to access the data, including via the Fractional Advertiser Contribution (FAC).

In his ISBA speech, Markey noted that advertisers will be the biggest funders of Origin moving forward, which ensures the industry plays a “significant part in making the decisions about how we develop and improve the platform to adapt to the changing media landscape.”

George says the introduction of the FAC was an “important milestone” in getting the project off the ground and cementing advertiser contributions.

“It was important to make sure that everyone had skin in the game,” he says.