Voice of the Premium Publisher: Spotlight On… Ian Dowds & James Oates

Published: 18 Apr 2024

Cutting through the noise: Ipsos iris and the value of industry-endorsed audience measurement

In the first of our new “Spotlight On…” series — where we shine a spotlight on pertinent industry issues and speak to those in the know — Richard Reeves caught up with Ian Dowds, CEO of UKOM, and James Oates, Head of Ipsos iris, to talk about governance in audience measurement, the need for data transparency, and the risks of an industry that has become too trusting of platform-provided insights.

Richard: Let’s set the scene. Take me back to the beginning.

Ian: Our story begins in 2010, when online media meant text and static pictures served on websites and browsed on computers. Every other channel had its own joint currency: BARB for TV, RAJAR for radio, but the internet was a Wild West where publishers and media owners were throwing out their own analytics numbers. The apples-to-apples comparisons that formed the basis of advertising strategy on other channels was impossible.

The industry came together to cut through the noise with an endorsed standard for audience measurement across the UK’s online landscape, and established UKOM to define and govern this standard. From January 2021, Ipsos iris with its single-source panel of more than 10,000 active participants and a synthetic data set of more than one million, has been the official source for online audience measurement in the UK, while UKOM’s raison d’etre has remained unchanged since 2010.

Richard: UKOM’s purpose may remain the same, but what challenges are you seeing in today’s ecosystem?

Ian: The internet today is an entirely different beast from 2010. People split their time between smartphones, tablets, and desktops, while usage within these devices is scattered across operating systems, browsers, and apps. By integrating into all these touchpoints with a simple tag-based system, Ipsos iris reveals deduplicated audience behaviour in all its complexity across the entire online ecosystem.

This single source of truth is especially valuable in the post-GDPR and soon to be post-cookie internet, where the sudden increase in the value of authenticated and consented first-party audience data seems to have turned every media owner with some digital real estate into an advertising platform. Search and social giants have had a foothold in this space for some time, but now various publishers, retailers, and streamers have all established their own media planning and campaign performance built upon first-party data.

Navigating this sea of data and making informed decisions on where to spend can be overwhelming for advertisers and agencies. Media owners, meanwhile, can struggle to look beyond their own walls to understand the true reach of their audiences and the influence of their content. And brands — which once could funnel goods through long-established and defined channels — now must find customers in the constantly shifting and fragmented world of ecommerce.

Now, if I was an advertiser and I was talking to my agency about how they measure audiences and campaign impact, I’d rightly expect them to use BARB for TV and RAJAR for radio. Yet for digital campaigns there’s a bizarre notion among many agencies that platform-supplied or web analytics data is good enough, despite it being the biggest channel for advertising spend. I’d be deeply concerned about having such a void in my data.

I suspect advertisers simply assume their agencies must be using verified audience measurement data for digital if they use one for other channels – but we know this is not the case.

James: We need transparent, trustworthy, industry-endorsed data to put everyone in the online world on the same page, and to create an environment where all parties in the digital supply chain can transact to a shared standard. But Ipsos iris isn’t just for the buying and selling of digital media, it’s for anyone who has an interest or a responsibility to understand how the UK population behaves online, from publishers looking to reach underserved audiences to businesses searching for untapped markets.

“Ipsos iris isn’t just for the buying and selling of digital media, it’s for anyone who has an interest or a responsibility to understand how the UK population behaves online, from publishers looking to reach underserved audiences to businesses searching for untapped markets.”
— James Oates, Head of Ipsos iris

Richard: We’re hearing a lot of noise about ecommerce and the opportunities in retail media. What role does Ipsos iris play in the success of this emerging channel?

James: Agencies have been receiving a lot of brand pressure to invest in retail media, but it’s still establishing its place in the media ecosystem. Each retail media platform provides its own media planning and campaign performance data, but looking at such data in isolation reveals nothing about the platform’s true reach and how it might overlap with others.

Ian: There’s a tale being spun at the moment that digital has “solved” retail media, but it’s a channel far older than the internet and one that is heavily laden with physical sites, promotional pricing and historic relationships between suppliers and retailers. This has not disappeared because everything’s been brought online with nice, new interfaces — online is just one component of a very established, complex, and lucrative market.

James: Absolutely. When advertising and sales channels are operated by the same entity and presented to the user within the same platform, it’s difficult to separate which sales can be attributed to an ad placement.

As well as fact checking campaign performance within platforms, Ipsos iris can help agencies determine which platforms are most worth investing in to begin with. Media planners can see where their target audiences — as well as their competitors — are most represented across various retailers side-by-side.

Perhaps one retailer provides the most audience scale but at a premium price, while two smaller retailers combined could end up beating it on scale at a lower total cost. Or two retailers might have large audiences in isolation, but when overlaid on top of each other, reveal a smaller pool of unique users on either side, allowing media planners to narrow down where they can find truly exclusive reach with minimal wastage.

Such decisions simply aren’t possible without a holistic and independently verified view of the entire retail media channel and its place within the wider media ecosystem. With Ipsos iris, this view is also current, kept up to date with daily reporting that can capture the sudden disruptions that can occur within a media channel when a new platform emerges.

Consider the meteoric rise of Temu, which gained an audience of more than 20 million just three months after launch. Because we can immediately onboard new platforms, we had an early alert to the disruptive potential of a new player in the space, and agencies who subscribed to us could advise their clients accordingly. This was a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment... but Ipsos iris doesn’t blink.

“[Temu gained] an audience of more than 20 million just three months after launch. Because we can immediately onboard new platforms, we had an early alert to the disruptive potential of a new player in the space, and agencies who subscribe to us could advise their clients accordingly. This was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment… but Ipsos iris doesn’t blink.”
— James Oates, Head of Ipsos iris

Richard: How does Ipsos iris interact with the wider data ecosystem?

James: Ipsos iris is not the be-all and end-all of audience measurement data. Individual properties and platforms do provide unique and valuable data-driven insights of their own, and we encourage Ipsos iris data to be plugged into these tools via its API. This enables us to layer in demographic and behavioural data which the site may not themselves be able to collect, such as frequent and infrequent users of online category sites. Following feedback from our client partners we have also worked to unlock deeper insights into online behaviour through iris on population segments, such as sexual orientation that have not always been best represented in measurement data.

What Ipsos iris provides that no other source can is audience data that we can all agree on as being trustworthy, from which any significant deviations will have to be explained, while being future-proofed to track any new and emerging channels that incumbents might prefer not to acknowledge. In short, it’s a protection against digital advertising platforms marking their own homework.

Richard: Finally, what’s keeping you up at night?

Ian: What keeps me up at night? The industry’s lack of discipline and rigour in challenging the data it is presented with. Whenever a claim is made or a plan is laid out that is justified with data, we’ve lost the instinct to ask, “What is the source? What was the methodology? Is it robust? Is it objective?”

“What keeps me up at night? The industry’s lack of discipline and rigour in challenging the data it is presented with. Whenever a claim is made or a plan is laid out that is justified with data, we’ve lost the instinct to ask, ‘What is the source? What was the methodology? How was it modelled?’”
— Ian Dowds, CEO of UKOM

Even at the most basic level, I see so many presentations packed with stats and graphs but not one source in the footnotes. Sammie Eales, from Mail Metro Media’s fantastic insights team — who do back up their data with methodology — noted at the last AOP CRUNCH event that advertisers simply don’t ask to look behind the curtain at how audiences are constructed.

If the data source that any business is using to construct a story about itself is its own data, that's fine — it just comes with an asterisk of self-interest. Anyone with Ipsos iris data at hand can easily ascertain whether a claim is too good to be true and contextualise isolated insights against the entirety of online activity in the UK.

A big reason this keeps me up at night is that my daughter has recently joined the industry. The one piece of advice I’m constantly reiterating is to put up her hand and ask, “Is this data robust, is it transparent, is it objective?” And I hope Ipsos iris helps the next generation answer these questions and restore rigour to how we scrutinise the data that is all around us.