This furthers the GVMA’s ambition to unite brands, agencies and publishers worldwide around common standards for video measurement across social media and online platforms.

The GVMA was formed in May 2019 by Tubular Labs, a UK specialist in social media audience measurement headquartered in London’s Barbican Centre. It was in the US where the GVMA had cut its teeth before that launch, conducting tests there for several months early in 2019. This led to recruitment of several major US media companies, including Media Chain, joining co-founders Vice North America, BuzzFeed, Group Nine, Viacom International, Ellen Digital Network and Corus Entertainment. All these were motivated by the desire to harmonize an increasingly fragmented video audience measurement scene after it had fractured across multiple online and social media outlets. The stated aim was to develop "new global standards for digital video measurement”, starting with social video, aiming to create a more transparent and efficient marketplace for video ads.

Since then, the GVMF effort has overlapped with a few other industry initiatives with similar motivations, such as the World Federation of Advertisers’ programme to establish a cross media measurement system that would interoperate with existing analytics tools to extract the required information. The WFA, representing global brands and national advertiser associations, has been seeking comparability between standards already set by relevant organizations such as the Media Rating Council (MRC) in the US and France’s Centre d'Étude des Supports de Publicité (CESP). This should provide consistent audience building blocks for derivation of metrics that will allow unbiased comparisons to be made. The WFA has also been developing and promoting checks and balances to protect user privacy, including preventing the re-identification of users, while ensuring as far as possible within that constraint that data fidelity is preserved to support use cases required by advertisers. Adaptability was also deemed crucial to ensure changing privacy rules and consent requirements can be accommodated with minimal disruption.

The GVMF has played into that and is making contributions of its own with Tubular Labs, in particular through two cross-platform reach and engagement metrics. These are de-duplication to count unique viewers accurately and, relating to that, total minutes watched by each user. Theses would give a clearer view of campaign success.

LADbible Group is a UK content publisher headquartered in Manchester aiming at young adults, claiming to reach two-thirds of 18–34-year-olds in the country. “We are honoured to accept GMVA’s invitation to join its Board,” said Colin Gottlieb, Chief Growth Officer at LADbible Group. “LADbible Group is one of the biggest online content creators, with nearly four billion video views every month. We have been audience and insight led since day one. We know the power and impact of video on driving social change and our branded video content uniquely brings brands to young audiences in an authentic way. This is a really exciting opportunity to work alongside fellow industry leaders to help positively shape the future of digital video and create an industry standard that gives our clients peace of mind.”

ZDF is a German public service broadcaster also intent on measuring the ad consumption of its younger viewers in particular as they roam across online and social media platforms. “Reaching all Germans with our content – that is the duty of ZDF as a public service broadcaster and a goal that we are highly committed to,” added SVP of Programming for ZDF Florian Kumb. “Meeting new demands in times of nonlinear media use is the big task of our time, although we are still reaching more than 80 per cent of the German population every month. Our strategy to increase offerings on platforms that especially young people use, requires reliable data to evaluate our success aside from TV and our own streaming service.”

GVMA members have agreed to global audience measurement standards afforded by Tubular Audience Ratings, one of the first de-duplicated audience and time-based systems for measuring video attention across social media platforms. Tubular has expanded its Audience Ratings suite with ecommerce measurement capabilities, providing customers a unique view into how product-related social video viewing influences online sales through Amazon.

“Bringing digital powerhouses like LADbible Group and ZDF to the table is one of the main goals of the GVMA – to foster a community of brands, media companies and agencies who want to see social video expand and thrive,” said Josh Schmiesing, President of GVMA and CMO of Tubular Labs.