VOZ’s introduction as trading currency has been earmarked for the end of the year.
For Karen Halligan, who took over as OzTAM CEO in October 2023, implementing the audience measurement system has been a challenge, but with a career that has included the “privilege of working on lots of big challenges” in roles like partner at KPMG and MD of Zenith, she welcomed the opportunity.
“I'm really lucky that the team here at OzTAM are fantastic and I feel that I've got the right people around me to make something like this run smoothly, which is a really good place to be,” she said.
“A lot of the heavy lifting was done before I joined, so I'm lucky. It's really been about getting everybody on board, doing change management and industry collaboration, which is the kind of stuff that I personally enjoy.
“There’s obviously a lot of complex stakeholders, and a lot of stakeholder management, but I'm actually enjoying that side of it as well and enjoying being a bit closer to the media industry again.”
VOZ brings together OzTAM’s metro TV data, regional TAM’s regional TV data, and OzTAM’s BVOD viewing into one de-duplicated database, measuring all free-to-air and subscription TV networks.
From an industry perspective, the introduction of VOZ enables networks, advertisers and marketers to plan, trade and post-analyse advertising campaigns by individual metropolitan and regional markets, and nationally.
With Australia being the only country in the world that has a product like VOZ - with fully integrated broadcast TV and granular BVOD measurement for both content and campaign performance – Halligan said that she has been approached by a lot of similar organisations in other countries who are keen to follow the example of OzTAM.
“I had a meeting with the Japanese market recently, where they were really trying to understand what we've built here,” she told AdNews.
“VOZ has the ability to ingest big data sources, streaming data and an array of different other sources, so we’re at the beginning of what's possible with VOZ. I feel that we're very well set up for leading in this specific area [worldwide], but also having a really good roadmap on how do we lean into other things that are happening globally.”
First announced back in 2018, VOZ has taken over half a decade to come to fruition.
The launch date of December 29 2024, however, was not chosen to allay further concerns about postponements or be able to boast that VOZ had launched in 2024 as promised – instead, Halligan said, it was a “considered, conscious and collaborative decision”, formed as a result of working closely with everyone who uses the VOZ data regularly.
“We had always had a plan in our mind of having that work done around July or August and that’s all done. We could change now if we wanted as it’s all ready, but that wasn't what everybody wanted,” she said,
“Everyone wanted appropriate change management, a logical window to adopt the technology, training, briefing sheets and support materials.”
That industry education and training program, which was running prior to yesterday’s announcement and will continue once 2025 rolls around, includes working with the Media Federation of Australia (MFA) on updating the materials for their television fundamentals training and TV buying programs.
“That's an accreditation course and all of the new buyers will go through that and those materials will be updated and available on an ongoing basis. We're also providing some bespoke assets that talk about ‘what is VOZ’ so that people can go and talk with their clients around that,” she said.
“We're also providing a series of one pagers on specific subjects and I've made a commitment to everybody that those assets would be available for all of the network broadcast partners, all of the agencies, IMAA and the MFA so that we’ve got consistent, informative, useful assets for the entire market.”
Halligan said that at the same time as OzTAM has been running an agency change management program, it’s also been working with mapping every data flow and where all of the information goes.
“In a lot of cases, our data is already there and it's a simple switch over. We've got the option to have the back end of the year to test everything and make sure that it's working,’” she told AdNews.
“The contingency plan [if it was delayed] would be TAM would stay as it is at the moment, but I'm not expecting that to be the case. We won't end up without data at all and we have a working group that meets regularly around the technology change-out and how to manage that seamlessly.
“We've got a lot of confidence in it running smoothly.”
In more good news for the industry body, Halligan said that VOZ Streaming - which will provide Australia’s first solution for enhanced multi-broadcaster programmatic BVOD trading – is ahead of schedule.
“We'll confirm the actual date when we're ready, because we'll also create some education materials and assets for all of our partners around that, but it’s on track for Q4 as promised to the market,” she said.
Once VOZ is officially rolled out, that focus on streaming will take centre stage for OzTAM internally.
OzTAM is currently in the process of installing streaming TV meters, with about 3,500 installed so far, aiming for 5,000 in the panel by the end of the year and full coverage next year.
“Those streaming meters give a level of data and richness of data around what's happening in the home across all different streaming channels, time of day, demographics etc - some really rich insight," she said.
"That’s the next plan for me - how do we use the streaming TV meter data to provide greater insight and viewing more holistically.
“Outside of that, streaming TV meters will help us with tackling deduplication because consumer behavior is changing rapidly. We've already started a program of work around exploring discussions on big data and analysis with partners, so that we can look at how we bring that into the mix to enrich the data that we actually have and how do we complement the panel with a huge level of granularity.”
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