The Future of TV Advertising measurement is...

...closer to total "regime change" than ever before, according to the experts.

Systems, by definition, are always in motion. What makes them interesting is why i.e. what makes them move and are those inputs sustainable.

Are we experiencing a natural evolution, a new normal, or the long-tail of a shock the industry never properly resolved?

Because the advertising-media ecosystem had its asteroid moment 10 years ago. Former MediaCom CEO Jon Mandel stood up at an ANA conference and accused major agencies of operating non-transparent rebate and kickback schemes. Those remarks triggered the ANA/K2 Intelligence investigation, which found “pervasive” non-transparent practices, and then “Mediapalooza” — the biggest coordinated round of media reviews in history.

Billions moved not because the work was suddenly worse, but because advertisers stopped trusting the system underneath it.

This affected me personally: I started my career as an advertising and media correspondent at Campaign just months before that bomb went off. The mix of money, incentives, secrecy and self-deception has kept me hooked ever since. Why I pore over econometrics charts and force myself to read and reread arcane adtech nonsense. Why I launched a dedicated publication (The Media Leader) covering the media business of advertising.

This is where the money, the politics, and the action is in our industry. With all due respect, it’s not about John Lewis Christmas ads.

So, sitting in that overcrowded measurement room at FTVA, in a different decade, on a different continent, it was obvious: the Mandel aftershock is still rippling under the carpet.

Nervous energy

The atmosphere was a blend of optimism and barely disguised anxiety. You could hear it in the applause (quick, polite, slightly strained). People wanted certainty.

What they got was more definitions. New ways of describing impressions, attention, outcomes. As digital media expert Laura Chaibi said during a panel she moderated, there are now “142 different ways of measuring various things”.

When an industry keeps rewriting its own vocabulary, it’s usually because it no longer recognises what it’s trying to describe.

And now the shit is hitting the fan. The economic backdrop is making everyone twitchy. Not to mention the political environment (which I’ll just describe as ‘Trump’ and move on, before I give myself a brain bleed). Linear TV revenue is pressured while digital video (much of it measured only by the platforms themselves) is becoming ubiquitous across all digital media, not just connected TV.

When more and more spend flows into environments that refuse shared standards, the people whose livelihoods depend on shared standards start to feel the floor move.

Publicly, there was consensus. Privately, you could feel the gaps. The old panel-based TV world doesn’t match how people actually watch anything anymore. The audience has left the pen. The industry is still whistling for it to come back.

Who gets to define reality now?

This series of sessions on “measurement", hosted by ASI executive director, was Bradly a discussion about the “future role of JICs”. You could even have viewed what unfolded as a philosophical fight over who gets to define reality in a post-Mandel world.

On one side, Origin, ISBA’s advertiser-led cross-media measurement project. The plan was that Origin would become an independent company by now, as former ISBA and Origin boss Phil Smith told me in an interview last year. While Origin has registered as a limited company, it has not yet produced any accounts. As you’ll see in my interview with Smith, funding remains an issue for Origin, but that’s a separate discussion.

As the initiative’s chief customer officer Martin Lawson reminded the room, Origin is designed to give advertisers “deduplicated reach and frequency across a range of campaigns” and sits within a WFA framework for “what best-in-class cross-media measurement looks like according to advertisers.”

In other words: this is the advertiser view of reality, encoded in software. And, for the first time in public, we were about to see Origin produce real numbers from an advertiser’s post-campaign analysis.

Birds Eye’s brand lead Colin Buckingham and media agency Zenith UK’s planning director Phoebe Dent shared the frozen food brand’s first major campaign on the new masterbrand platform.

Origin told them that just under 41 million people were exposed to their ad, and—crucially—that “about a quarter of people were exposed to the ad on one or more platform”. That ability to see deduplicated audience numbers and potentially give advertisers crucial information about how to stop bombarding people with ads across multiple platforms, has always been a key draw. I’ll zoom in on that chart so it’s clearer:

You can see why the client team was happy. “TV is still massively important,” as Buckingham told the room; Origin helped him prove to internal stakeholders that linear was delivering scale, while also highlighting “blind spots” such as low frequency on YouTube and an opportunity to invest more there.

So far, so reasonable. But when you look more closely at what’s being celebrated, you start to see the jungle.

In her follow-up presentation, Origin’s customer lead Stephanie Marks made two comments that crystallised the whole debate. First: “There isn’t a right or wrong answer from origin.” Second: “It’s not claiming to be a silver bullet, but it’s shining a light on data that you haven’t been able to see until now.”

Read that again. No right or wrong answer. No single standard. Just a light shone on whatever definition each platform and advertiser brings to the table.

Zoom in again on the picture above, but in a different area, and you can see for yourself:

This table shows you the same ad’s performance when measured against different standards, ranging from 100% completed, to the Media Rating Council’s definition of a completed view (two whole seconds!), to AMI, or “all media impressions” (which is what? More than zero seconds and less than two seconds?!?!)

Here something you’ll never EVER hear: “And this year’s Ad of the Year, one-second category, goes to….”

But that difference between crud and 100% (34.68 and 40.76) is what enabled Buckingham to say that Birds Eye’s ad got an “85% completion rate across channels”.

In practice, we know what that means. Meta defines a video “view” as three seconds of continuous play. YouTube can count a skippable impression even when viewers bail almost instantly. TikTok autoplays the moment you land on a video. Bundle all that into a single “all media impressions” and “completed views” number and you get something that looks clean but is conceptually incoherent. Origin surfaces it, but it doesn’t contest it.

That’s the advertiser-led model: maximum flexibility, minimum judgement.

Own the measurement, own the narrative

On the other side of the philosophical divide: the JICs, represented here by Work Research managing partner Tony Regan, who was speaking under the IPA (UK agency trade body) banner.

Regan put up a simple chart showing the percentage of UK ad spend traded through joint industry currencies over 20 years. Around 2005, almost everything flowed through JICs. Today, as he told the room, “perhaps 80% of the money going from buy side to sell side is not traded by JICs, but to buy outcomes.”

His description of the shift was blunt: “You could say this is a picture of regime change.”

JICs, Regan pointed out, produce “objective, transparent, accountable” data through cross-industry collaboration, governed by principles “all parties agree on.” Their job in 2025 isn’t just to deliver ratings; it’s to stop the industry’s understanding of effectiveness being “locked away in walled garden ecosystems” controlled entirely by platforms.

In other words: if Origin is the jungle, JICs are trying to be the last remaining park rangers.

The Panel: Candour and can-do

The panel that followed put human voices to that tension: ITV’s Sameer Modha, Sky Media’s Matt Hill, Numeris’ Catherine Malo, and Bandar Al Mashhadi from Saudi Arabia’s Media Rating Company.

Modha was disarmingly frank about how the market has already voted. “Advertisers have spoken with their wallets,” he said.

(L-R): Chaibi (moderator), Modha, and Malo

The game, as he sees it, “moves to a combination of large-scale data sets” that can feed outcome models. This is his version of realism: if you want to prove effect, you need the “truckload of exposures” that device data provides, even if measurement purists find it ugly.

He also nailed one of the key fault lines: the industry’s “very fresh debate” about measuring “devices versus people”. As he put it, there are “pearl clutchers who go… it has to be people,” but “between now and when I’m a granddad, we’re gonna have to move.”

Sky Media’s Hill echoed that uncomfortable truth from the broadcaster side. Asked what advertisers want, he was clear: “They’d like it all together, please… in one place.” Sky, he said, would love to offer that “single currency view”. The problem is legacy spaghetti. All that historical measurement wiring has been repeatedly shoved into the attic and tangled together. “It’s very difficult to untangle,” he admitted.

Earlier in the day, Hill’s colleague Jeff Eales had told the same audience that Sky alone runs “seven different measurement systems”. Later, Hill spelt out the implications: broadcasters need to “bring measurement of TV into the 21st Century” and “do it for less… we need to find ways of doing it more cost effectively.”

(L-R): Malo, Hill, Al Mashhadi

Al Mashhadi, coming from a younger market with less legacy infrastructure, described the Saudi opportunity very differently. With “the first time we have, like, a ‘people meter’ and a proper measurement.” Because Media Rating Company is unburdened with “the lights of Christmas” to untangle, his ambition is to build a centralised source of data from the start — TV, then digital, then out-of-home and gaming — and maybe even “start exporting a new model.”

In other words: while mature markets struggle to retrofit coherence onto a 40-year-old system, newer ones are trying to build a cleaner stack from scratch.

Across all of this, Malo articulated the JIC role in a fragmented world. Big data versus panels, she argued, is the wrong binary: “I don’t think they’re incompatible… the beauty is actually leveraging all those data source and leveraging the foundation of a JIC.”

Outcomes, she reminded everyone, are “messy… this world is really messy,” and “you still don’t get your deduplication.” That’s where, in her words, “the fundamental purpose of a JICis to bring clarity at an efficient cost, and to bring more transparency to… the entire ecosystem.”

You could hardly script a clearer philosophical clash: Origin shining a light on whatever data advertisers can get, versus JICs trying to define what counts as clarity in the first place.

The pretence of transparency

Here’s the bit no one said explicitly, but which kept surfacing between the lines.

Okay, three bits:

First, advertisers don’t really want measurement; they want justification. Modha came closest to saying the quiet part out loud when he asked, rhetorically: “If transparency was that valued and that precious to… advertisers, why are they spending the way they’re spending?”

Hill made a complementary point when he suggested that, for many advertisers (especially smaller ones) transparency is “less of a priority… than being able to have a bit of paper that shows them the result of their spend to give to their bosses.”

Origin understands this psychology perfectly. As Marks (pictured, left, below) explained, Origin isn’t there to tell you what’s right — “there isn’t a right or wrong answer from Origin” — it simply helps you “look at what that unique reach is that’s being delivered by channel” and play scenario games. It is, in her own words, “not claiming to be a silver bullet.”

(L-R): Marks, Dent, Buckingham, and Lawson

Second, platforms have already won the psychological war. They give advertisers what they crave: clean, fast, simple stories. Even if the inputs are inconsistent, the story format is soothing. Broadcasters, meanwhile, turn up with legacy baggage, caveats and half-fixed plumbing.

“We need the will” across the industry to change, Hill said at the end of the session. The subtext was: we haven’t had it yet.

Third, the industry has never resolved the trust deficit Mandel exposed. Back then, advertisers stopped trusting agencies. Now they don’t fully trust anyone’s measurement — not the platforms’, not the JICs’, often not even their own. Everyone is second-guessing everyone else’s definitions.

That’s why this isn’t just a measurement problem any more. It’s a philosophical one.

If, as Malo says, outcomes are “really messy”, and if even cross-media tools proudly avoid right and wrong answers, then the industry has quietly walked away from the idea of a shared reality. We no longer agree what a “view” is, what an “impression” is, or what “completion” should mean… and yet we still talk as if we’re all trading the same thing.

Where this leaves us: the aftershock

BARB’s panel-based logic cannot stretch indefinitely to a world where “TV” increasingly happens on smartphones, in algorithmic feeds, outside the home, inside walled gardens that regard data as state secrets.

Everyone on that stage knows this. Modha openly said that “we’re going to have to move” towards device-based measurement. Malo talked about hybrid models: panels at the centre, “leveraging all those data source[s]” around them. Bandar insisted that JICs “cannot work as only a governing… body”; they have to be “an enabler, living and breathing,” reflecting whether “it is human… [or] computers that are seeing this.”

The outlines of the future are already visible. Large-scale device data feeding outcome models. Panels used as calibration, not currency. JICs shifting from traffic cops to infrastructure stewards. The open question is who holds authority when the numbers conflict.

If there’s a bomb waiting to go off, it’s this: the moment the industry finally admits that a single universal audience currency may never come back as a default setting.

If that happens, TV stops being one marketplace and becomes a constellation of walled gardens stitched together with whatever Frankenmetrics each player finds convenient. Comparability becomes optional; premiums become harder to defend. So cross-media planning becomes a negotiation between competing realities rather than a debate about reach and frequency.

Maybe Mandel wasn’t the asteroid. Maybe he was the tremor before the real quake… the one that forces the industry to abandon the illusion of a single measurement truth altogether.

Three moments that said it all

1. An 85% “completed view” stat that sounds impressive, even though, by Origin’s own design, “there isn’t a right or wrong answer” behind what “completion” means.

2. Matt Hill admitting Sky has “seven different measurement systems” and that it’s “very difficult to untangle” them, even as advertisers “would like it all together… in one place.”

3. Sameer Modha asking, “If transparency was that valued and that precious… why are they spending the way they’re spending?” and conceding that in an outcomes world, many advertisers just need a “bit of paper that shows them the result” to take to their bosses.

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