Digital advertising: Rai and Mediaset call on the web’s major players to ensure transparency

“The mass audience has fragmented. The algorithm is an excellent salesperson but a terrible community-builder,” sums up Anna Sfardini, lecturer in Research Methods on Media Production and Consumption and head of research at Ce.R.T.A. The risk is that ‘without a shared audience, advertising ceases to generate that fundamental collective imagination, and the brand therefore risks being reduced to mere background noise’.

This is where television comes back into the discussion, due to its ability to attract large audiences, which clearly retains its commercial value. Luca Poggi, managing director of Rai Pubblicità, turns the perspective on its head: ‘Over the last 10 years, there has been a lot of talk about what we don’t have – namely targeting and performance – and not enough talk about what others don’t have: our audiences’. And he puts a figure on the table: “Every evening, from 8.30 pm to 9.30 pm, Rai and Mediaset bring together – at the very least – 12 million people on average per minute.”

From the advertisers’ perspective, too, the aim is no longer simply to find the right consumer. Edoardo Felicori, Ferrero’s Regional Media Manager for Italia, cites ‘challenges relating to relevance and attention’ as among the main ones. To build brand equity, he explains, the company also seeks out “moments of cultural significance, such as Sanremo”. But even with a term that has become as central as ‘attention’, there remains a problem of measurement: “There is still no industry-wide consensus on what ‘attention’ actually is.”

In short, context matters. “It is important to remember that brand equity is also built within certain types of editorial contexts,” adds Felicori, emphasising the role of the editorial partner and brand safety.

But it is in the area of measurement that the system reaches its most sensitive point. In the UK, only 16 per cent of advertising spend is currently based on audience figures measured by independent bodies, compared with 80 per cent ten years ago. For the rest, the market relies on the platforms’ proprietary metrics, which may find themselves in the position of both selling advertising space and measuring its performance.

“The promise has only been partly fulfilled,” explains Massimo Scaglioni, director of Ce.R.T.A. “Digital technology has made advertising more widespread and, on the face of it, more efficient, but it has also created an opaque system.” The crux of the matter, he adds, can be summed up in one sentence: “Those who sell advertising are also the ones who measure whether it has worked.”

That is why the Italian market now also hinges on Audicom. Matteo Cardani, Chief Marketing Officer at Mfe Advertising, looks ahead to the next fifteen months and points to the Joint Industry Committee (a body comprising all market stakeholders: operators and the advertising sector) as “the most interesting environment in which to work within our industry”, with the task of establishing cross-media measurement in accordance with the AGCOM resolution. Because, as Cardani argues, ‘the market cannot have 50 shades of server-to-server; it needs the certainty of third-party, independent metrics’.

The problem, then, is finding a common yardstick for media that operate in different ways. Federico Di Chio, SVP of International Strategic Marketing at MFE, goes as far back as Aristotle to describe it: ‘Currency is what makes the value of otherwise incommensurable objects comparable’. Applied to advertising, the issue is a practical one: “How, for example, do you define cross-media contact? We need comparative assessments and a single, measurable standard.”