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Alldience: How it works and its main uses

19 April 2020

Alldience: Step by step

Immetrica, specialised in data systems for audience measurement for more than three decades, and eCGlobal Research Solutions, a fast-growing leading panel operator, panel technology and advertiser services company in the Americas, present Alldience, a state-of-the-art audiovisual audience measurement system.

Alldience measures any audiovisual content with sound played at nonzero volume: realtime and timeshifted conventional television, DVR, VOD, OTT, radio, digital audio, advertising on social media and on the Web, in-app play, at home or mobile. If the content can be ingested in realtime (as with a TV channel or a radio station) or separately (advertising creatives, OTT programs and movies), Alldience can recognise it.

Data are collected by a library that integrates into a mobile application (we have experience of several such integrations; in the most difficult case, it takes several days). This allows the app operator to keep its mobile application as it is by adding the function of collecting audio-visual data. We recognise the content (TV channel/radio station, broadcast or advertisement) with a 5-second recording (identifying a segment of the content with accuracy of within 1 second) every 10 seconds. The remaining 5 seconds of the cycle, we release the microphone to allow any other use of the microphone on a smartphone or tablet, except for the built-in phone, which always has precedence. So in the worst case, to use the voice assistant, sound recording application, or make calls via Skype, WhatsApp and similar applications, the device user will need to click one or two additional times on the corresponding interface button.

The main method of recognition is ACR fingerprinting, that is, a function of the recorded sound; in addition, if the client so desires, we can add watermarking, a signal at a frequency above the maximum audible to humans; this gives recognition not only of the content and channel/station, but also the exact path of the content to the listener, for example, YouTube or the website or the broadcaster’s mobile application. The packet sent over the network is very small (the set of fingerprints itself is only 3 bytes) and only sparingly uses the listener’s mobile data plan. At present, we do not keep the data connection open while the mobile device is sleeping, but save data packets until the next network opening, which happens even once the phone sleeps about once per hour. Thus, we spend about 8-12% of each full charge of the smartphone. If the client prefers, we can keep the network up constantly, slightly increasing the battery consumption: this will allow extremely fast data collection, in which two-dimensional views become available about 15-20 minutes from the time of listening. All versions of Android from

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4.4.21 to 10 are supported. An iOS version is under development and, if needed, it can probably be released by the end of the year.

Data from the ACR system, especially with measurement on a mobile device, look significantly different than data from people-meters or RPD (return path data from STBs of pay-TV operators): they are one-dimensional (5-second point in time), have to enable recognition of additional sources of sound (mobile devices are increasingly used at the same time as a TV or computer to view different content, especially advertising, which is increasingly distributed on online and social networks, where it is often not found in the middle of other audiovisual content), and they cannot be used raw (details of the processing applied available under NDA). We used our significant experience in creating systems for processing audience measurement data between collection and analytics, and created a non-trivial, meticulously thought out, and carefully tested processing system specifically to ensure the quality of the results that we provide in the form of two-dimensional respondent-level viewing events and standard reports. Soon we will release a Web interface for analytical queries by users. Also, there is already a set of systems providing quality and context: demographic data management, sample demographic balancing and weighting, intab calculation, signal source, VOD/OTT and advertising creative management, broadcast programme schedule management, OTT operator automated content discovery (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Disney +, Apple TV + and others), mass ingestion of OTT content at scale into the ACR library, automated submission of ad creatives into the ACR library, and multiple alerting systems that protect the normal functioning of various service components.

Our ACR is one of the highest quality in the world and with the competent organisation of reference tracking of TV channels/radio stations, it rarely skips 10-second cycles, even if the smartphone is placed in a protective case and dropped in the pocket of a jacket. When the phone is two meters away in another room with the door open, skips in recognition occur, but our processing system easily copes with them. In a quiet building, recognition was proven even when the smartphone and sound source were on neighboring floors, and when the speaker volume was at a minimum level. Bill Harvey, the dean of US audiovisual audience measurement today and one of the ARF (Advertising Research Foundation)’s main motive forces, has examined our data and has proclaimed our system the best available.

Our ACR provider is not only one of the best, but probably the most affordable. Our company has a special agreement with it, which further reduces the cost and, consequently, the price for which we can work. Thus we can be the most affordable solution in almost any territory and setting.

Our system produces highly stable, consistent and credible data even at small sample sizes.

1 In combination with standard apps from eCGlobal, the minimum supported version is Android 5.

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Principal uses for pay-TV system operators

• TV/VOD/OTT measurement of viewing on your system and optionally in the market as a whole

• Measures your subscribers’ viewing that RPD doesn’t: VOD and OTT services not directly controlled by you or those not subscribed through you; understand what your subscribers are watching and where they are watching it; use all available data to prevent churn

• Helps sell your local insertion minutes • True personal viewing, rather than possible viewing (which may be tuning-

without-viewing) on RPD STBs that it might not even be possible to aggregate to households

• No problems with uneven distribution of RPD STBs across your subscriber base (e.g., where RPD might exist only on high-end plans’ STB models, or only on newer ones)

• Much lower costs than starting your own RPD service; often, less expensive than operational costs of existing RPD service

• Measurement that permits you to sell your local insertion minutes with complete demographic context, and thus at a higher price, and to combine minutes on different channels for larger flights

• Advertising measurement on any medium, TV, video, radio, audio, online, social media; can be used to market your barter ad minutes

• Ad playout verification that includes your insertion ad minutes

eCGlobal services

• For your advertisers, comprehensive campaign services including multiple KPIs, ROI, sales lift, complete consumer journey and proof of campaign effect on sales. eCGlobal, which serves numerous household-name CPG and marketing-intensive companies throughout Latin America, has demonstrated such work with Coca-Cola Brazil to great acclaim last year

• Social-media tracking, GDPR-compliant single-source with the same panelist ID • Content pretesting helps optimise the positive effect of your original or exclusive

programming