I wrote the Facebook My Screen report – this is the story behind it

Nice response Shep. The industry is so quick with knee jerk reactions that suit whichever agenda they agree with (or get paid by). It’s about time people realise the digital vs traditional era is over. Let’s just focus on advertisers getting what they paid for and dodgy or imperfect data being called out. It’s impossible to get a single source of truth with so many agendas, methodologies and tech being used but let’s try get as close as we can, together, and make sure the caveats are clear.

So not even Nielsen believe the Nielsen numbers??

This gets even more strange e.g. “For top 20 2018 the team used OzTAM as printed in the Australian Government Screen Australia 2018 review.” There is not a single reference to Screen Australia in the finished report, and yet here they are presented as an impartial data source?

And I cant find any 2018 printed document from Screen Australia. Only thing I could find was their 2018 Year in Review which only talks about the top 10 TV dramas:

https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/media-centre/news/2019/01-22-2018-year-in-review-and-2019-preview

On their website they have top 50 TV drama EPISODES of 2018…again just narrative content:

https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fact-finders/television/australian-content/top-drama-titles

And why would PwC use OzTAM ratings via Screen Australia instead of just going to the source?!

So odd.

Shep

You just used the wrong data probably best to be upfront about that rather than blaming everyone else. What a mess for PwC.

Wow

Tea sipping gif… this is easily the best media fight of 2019.

Opinions are not facts. This wouldn’t have happened under Megan Brownlow. PwC advisory brand has really been tarnished.

This defence is rather lacklustre and if anything it has further deepened my skepticism of the entire exercise

I’m also surprised PwC doesn’t have a restraint clause on former employees…

The problem is not the numbers themselves – though they are cobbled together from different sources.

The problem is the way that they’ve been conflated and mis-represented so that PWC can sell a puff piece for Facebook.

Classic case of my effect here, Ben.

You weren’t associated with this report until now. Should’ve kept your head down.

To Ben for putting his hand up.

Didn’t need to and it shows serious character.

“at PwC our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems.”

The report fails miserably on both accounts.

How many Shred-X trucks can PwC fit in the loading dock at Barangaroo?

What is with these comments about excluding half the viewership of BVOD? The article points out that there is no data to back it up. And in fact the number that has been put out by a TV body was 35?
And yet Ben is the one accused of making up numbers?
Honestly, if you come at this with your mind already made up, what’s the point? As an industry we’re screwed if we can’t be evidence based.
To paraphrase Cuba “SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE”…. We’ve got a study here showing some evidence. If we disagree with it, surely we have to have some evidence to counter it, rather than just your opinion? Doesn’t that just make you a huge hypocrite?

If you commission a report via Facebook, you have to expect them to spin it and it seems like the issue stems from Facebook’s response in AdNews.

Their takeout that BVOD doesn’t add incremental reach to linear TV was quite naive – as ThinkTV said, why would someone watch the same show/episode on both? You would expect overlap in audiences. Does the original report discuss any of this?

Agree that many people are applying their own confirmation bias to this study. Good on you Ben for standing up for your work, there is no silver bullet and I think your ambitious study made that quite clear.

That said, there were some things that didn’t sit right with me:

1. FB claiming the biggest reach when it is not a 100% AV platform. If I was Google, I’d be really salty. I highly doubt video minutes consumed on FB’s family of apps outweigh minutes consumed on YouTube. Hoping the report did factor that in rather than taking that reach number out of context. Happy to be proven wrong here.

2. There was no delineation between personal and shared screens that naturally influence reach and attention quality. SVOD was the winner in that report, but there wasn’t much discussion around co-viewing and shared screens – are those numbers potentially even bigger? Given FB does not play in TV at all, I do think this is important.

3. No clear view on fast growing screens like CTV. There is existing research on this area but it would have been good to understand from this report – how many consumers in Australia have pulled the plug on linear TV? What % of Aussies are live streaming? With YouTube ramping up in CTV, it isn’t just BVOD/SVOD vs linear, it’s AVOD too.

At the end of the day, a big tech giant is paying good money for reputable research and PWC can’t exactly serve their client an unpolished turd when it comes to stats about their brand. Rather than complaining, everyone should disregard the FB is #1 slides and take the valid points from the research. We’ve never had a silver bullet solution so why is it such a big surprise that we need to apply critical thinking to what we are reading?

Many in this debate have conducted themselves rather shabbily in my view that it is little wonder those in the industry are as trustworthy as car dealers.

The report is not without flaws and shows such callowness from Pwc to believe it could be done with the data available. Or that any report using data that may be uncomplimentary to TV would not attract a rabid defense from the cosy media selling and buying groups

Another case of the accountants trying their hand at advertising!

I read, and still have, the original version. It’s flawed in way more ways than just the Neilson data. I guarantee that anyone with more than 5 years in media would identify 5 major defects.

This has all the ingredients of the EMMA vs Roy Morgan debate on newspaper readership.

Wind forward 6 years and it’s all about SVOD.

Although it looks like this time around Roy Morgan is the winner.

No disrespect to the author but this is a brave article. I read the article multiple times to be completely subjective about the topic but despite of the topic being about the report, be it “dodgy” or not, all I could really grasp was “I wrote this article to tell you I sold a report while employed from another company, no one likes it, so I am selling it again but I don’t work for that company anymore but here I am anyway, I’m still selling it”.

I get PwC’s business but if we really want to drive a step forward, which was what the report meant to be, should we not just rally the key stakeholders without having to sell something to a company? The bottom line, IMHO, is the report was commissioned (i.e. sold) as the employment’s KPI, nothing more, nothing less. Arguing the belief – re: the value and credibility of the report – is kind of diluted from that perspective.

The defense of the report was about as long as the report itself – which is a pretty telling sign of a cock up by PWC, the author and FB.

Wouldn’t it be better to just own the mistake and clearly flawed logic in its methodology, as well as indicating it was always going to heavily bias / overstate FB and PWC’s impact?

Agree with “Fail Fast” – Shep, admit the stuff up and move on – rather than egotistically defend what is clearly a gaping hole of a report and ultimately shitty PR endeavor for PWC. Hopefully a lesson in not getting drunk off the PWC coolade and remaining continuously objective and critical in the formulation published work… before publishing.

For the last few years , media agencies have been putting together video plans combining FB, YT, TV & VOD. What is alarming is some of them are guessing the right mix of investment as they don’t have a viewpoint on combined reach and frequency. One thing is clear despite some of the facts not being clear – media agencies have over invested in channels like paid social without understanding its contribution to the media mix / weight of campaign. This push and overemphasis for the newer non linear TV. Channels has been driven by much bigger mark ups for media agency profit – as well as creating an overly complicated martech ecosystem – that make it easier to hide very high profit margins. In fact this is only ever rally spotted when the business moves. I saw a newly won client was paying 8x the rate they should be paying to FB. To name only one of many. Clients need to ask tougher questions of their media agencies. Media agencies need to own the research / tool to work out the right levels of spend and the mix. It shouldn’t be left to anyone with an interest in selling airtime to a client.

I haven’t seen this report yet, but . . .
Surely this work deserves a place in the sun. Ben clearly sets out its intent and potential defects. This should be a breath of fresh air in a stagnant pool of regressive heavily media owner controlled, so called currency data from OzTam, Nielsen, ThinkTV, IAB etc. Lets face it FreeTV and media agencies are doing it tough and any independent research that seeks to provide new insights that reveal declines in their popularity will be heavily criticized by them. It directly impacts their main traditional revenue stream of agencies who are the lifeblood of FreeTV.
This pattern of ‘kill it off’ criticism reflects the head in the sand, ‘we control the world’ attitude that has brought them to this unhappy place. (They do the same thing trying to kill of the ABC, the countries most trusted news source)
With all this hoo haa i reckon it deserves a hard second look!

Pathetic! Someone tries to shine new light on video consumption, albeit imperfect, and all the old guard vested interests do their best to kill it off. Nothing has changed!

Nothing to do with ‘the old guard’, it’s to do with a clearly flawed approach creating a skewed report that never should have seen the light of day, and hubris it takes to then try and defend it despite the clear and glaring problems.

PWC: Pricey, Worthless, Clowns

The author exposes an open secret – Nielsen’s data is crap and they know it’s crap. Plus the point about heavy handed terms of use of the data is one I’ve personally experienced with Nielsen too. It led to my company terminating our contract with Nielsen a number of years ago, and their behaviour in that period was execrable – so much so that I’ve made it a kind of sport to torpedo the Nielsen subscription at every organisation I move to. So far I’m 4 for 4.