Why Platform-Reported Measurement Is Wrong and How to Solve It | Moe Chughtai, Global Vice President at MiQ

Fragmented Attention And Ad Accountability

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 0:00

Attention is more fragmented than ever, and advertisers face challenges that they've never had to consider. I've got users on social and users on streaming. I've got users on conventional, traditional television, on broadcast and cable. I've got users, users everywhere, but how do I measure my ad spend effectively? How do I look at a multi-channel media allocation responsibly as a steward of investment and deploy that in a way that I know will generate a return that I can measure? Not just one that says I did a great job inside the platform, but one that actually shows up on the bottom line. Today's conversation is with Moe Chughtai. Moe leads global partnerships and strategy for all things TV at MIQ and brings us a wealth of information perspective on how advertisers are facing that precise problem. How do I allocate spend responsibly across all of these different channels, reaching all of these different audiences and generations? But do it with a unified data strategy and a unified measurement framework. Make sure and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening. Enjoy the conversation.

What MIQ Does For Advertisers

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 1:13

Moe, thank you so much for being here. I'd love to maybe set the set the framework with who MIQ is. Who you are, what problem do you solve, and who do you solve it for?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 1:27

Yeah, well, first of all, Tim, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I'm a longtime listener. So excited to first on caller. Excited for that. MIQ is a tech-enabled programmatic managed services partner. It's a mouthful. But what that means is we work with agencies and brands who want to run digital advertising across all ecosystems. We've built an AI technology that sits on top of all of the different buying platforms. So whether that's open web DSPs like the Trade Desk and Amazon, or more closed web solutions like Google and Meta, all of that buying technology is integrated into our Sigma platform. We've got a data layer that sits on top of that. And so then we can enable smarter planning, AI driven across all these different worlds, better activation. You know, the staff that I like to use is our traders on average run about 45 campaigns a month. The median agency trader runs about five. Wow. And so the difference is the technology that allows them to kind of run at that scale.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 2:28

That's incredible. And it sounds like we're kind of covering off a lot of the digital and especially the video universe. Could you maybe take us through, use the trade desk there as an as an example for the audience that maybe isn't as familiar with this concept? Can you kind of articulate who are some of those other platforms? What does this actually enable the advertiser to do?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 2:49

Yeah, so it's interesting.

Buying Streaming Across Multiple DSPs

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 2:50

Like, you know, we've talked about fragmentation in the video and TV world for a while. The reality is, you know, there's far fewer actually digital streaming and video players than there are online websites. And so those streaming players are relatively large companies, a decent amount of market pull and market share. And so they get to decide to a degree which buying platforms they partner with. Netflix is a really good example of that, right? Netflix owns, you know, about 10% of total video activity on the big screen. And they dictate, they're open in in terms of you can buy them through multiple DSPs, but not every DSP, right? And so the Trade Desk is one of those partners that get provides access to a large-scale sort of portion of video inventory. But if you want to buy Amazon, you've got it Prime Video, you've got to go through the Amazon DSP. You want to buy YouTube and YouTube TV, you've got to go through the Google platforms. And then if you want to buy things like social video, which like hold another ball game all together, you've got to go through those, right? And so what we always say is like in order to get the scale you want in CTV, the minimum number of platforms you've got to run in is at least three. And you need good technology that lets you kind of play across across these different worlds.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 4:08

Cool. That makes a lot of sense to me. And you've been at MIQ for now the better part of a decade, which is incredible. You've seen the entire evolution take place. You've seen pre-streaming when we're really just talking about social and social video, obviously, still

How CTV Shifts Into Total TV

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 4:25

linear television. Can you maybe take us through the evolution of streaming as you've seen it?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 4:31

Yeah, I think when you're right, man, it's it's a little scary, but I'm coming on 10 years in December. And so I've seen you know the company grow from about 300 employees to you know now over 2,000. And so it's been an interesting journey. But you know, that that journey sort of mirrors what's happened in video and TV in that time, which is, you know, when we first launched a TV product at MIQ in 2017, early 2018. But even before that, I worked at a an early video DSP TubeMoegul. And you know, we we launched our first programmatic TV solution in you know 2013. And so I've been in and around sort of this space for well over a decade. And I think what we learned in that time is you know, the the early stage was all about educating advertisers about the CTV opportunity, that consumers were heading there and ad budgets needed to catch up. Right around COVID, the conversation shifted from awareness into well, how do I maximize the opportunity? Which is all about how do I find incremental audiences from your linear plan? How do I balance my frequency across all the different parts of video buying that I'm going to do? And so that was about 2020 to 2023. And I think from 24 onwards, we've started to have much more interesting conversations with advertisers, which are like, all right, now I'm in a total TV world. I get it, I bought it, I'm in, right? And it's it's almost funny to me when you know ad sellers are you sort of are still educating about the importance of CTV. It's like anyone who does marketing, we get it, right? It's it's fine. There's a British saying that is kind of hilarious, which is don't teach grandma how to suck eggs. I think that the reality is brands get it. Now it's about how do you make the most out of your TV investment, right? So that's like how do you do cross-channel frequency better? How do you plan smarter and better with all the data that's out there? And then I think critically, how do you make the open web and what traditionally we call wall gardens work well together? That is such a big unclock.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 6:37

So maybe a question we can answer for the audience today.

What TV Means By Generation

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 6:41

I don't know that we'll have a definitive everyone agrees on answer today, but from the conversations you're having, what is TV? We see this convergence. It's a it's a conversation we continue to have. Like, is podcasting TV? Well, podcasting is primarily video, and platforms like Netflix and Hulu are making huge investments in the creator economy. All those lines starting to blur between social, traditional television, kind of what we know, to just it's video and we consume it all the time, wherever we are, on whatever screen is in front of us. Is that the conversation or or how are you how are you painting the picture of what is TV?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 7:21

We take quite a broad approach to TV. We talk about total TV as sort of a concept that that covers all the different viewing forms that are out there. And one thing that we've learned in our data is the definition of DV varies differently depending on who you ask and especially which generation. Yeah, I bet. And so if you're speaking to a a boomer or even an older Gen X audience, TV is still your cable box, your satellite service, you know, it's traditional TV. Even in those generations, they're starting to adopt streaming more and more. But then if you talk to Gen X and millennials, you know, it's it's all about streaming and streaming first, and then maybe a little bit of linear where it comes to sports and news. And then as you go down, right, millennials are are kind of streaming first and YouTube first. Gen Z, the definition of TV is it's YouTube first, it's social video second, and then it's it's maybe streaming third. And then you know, the boomer box is is in its own like sort of world that you know you probably know what your kids aren't they're not engaging with at all. And as you go down from there, it's it's mobile first, right? And I think sometimes those in the ad space struggle a little bit with that definition because it's like, yes, consumers might be there, but the ad products of these companies are not fully there always. The trouble is advertising is always led by the consumer. And if you look at consumer behavior of younger audiences, they're watching things like shorts, like social video in ways that you would define as entertainment intelligence, right? I always give the example of I've got my younger brother who is Gen Z, he's on the older end of Gen Z. He watched most of the Sopranos on TikTok 90 seconds at a time before turning on the HBO app. Like literally, he knew every scene in that show before he turned it on. I think he liked the short form better than the long form.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 9:19

It's funny. I actually made that joke just just recently to a guest of gosh, I would love to watch Sopranos as a micro drama. Yeah, but you're describing it already exists. I just need to get on TikTok. It's so funny, yeah.

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 9:31

I mean, it kind of hurts personally as someone who like you know loves to get a lot of every season, every episode, we're showing up.

Planning Across Walled Gardens With Data

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 9:41

Clip culture for sure. So from an advertiser's perspective, you mentioned there a minute ago about some of the challenges of navigating walled gardens where maybe access is limited, prime video, YouTube TV, the right kind of the the owned and operated inventory of Amazon and Google, specifically, you can only buy it through their pipes, and then you have a dynamic like Netflix, and then you have the more broad open internet. That's kind of everyone who's playing nice in the sandbox. Can you take us through maybe just a level above the workflow for an advertiser of all right, great, I want to be in all of these places, Moe, I want to be on Prime Video, I want to be on YouTube TV, I want to be on Paramount, MBCU, I still want to do my social things. How do we do that?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 10:30

Yeah, it's such a good question. Well, first of all, the reality is advertisers are doing it, right? Even in a world, let's imagine a world in the ultimate binary that sometimes you know the discussion kind of takes, right? Which is if it's a walled garden, it's completely walled. I I think that's not true. I'll talk about why in a second. But even in that world, the reality is if your audience is on TikTok, you need to be on TikTok. If your audience is on Netflix, you need to be on Netflix, right? And so this is what I mean by advertising follows the audience. And so when you think about how do you combine these worlds together from a like above the workflow from a strategy perspective for an advertiser, it really is about how do you plan effectively across different ecosystems that provide differing levels of data to me. And in a world that operates that way, I think it's so, so important for advertisers to own data themselves and to partner with companies who sit outside of these platforms that are going to allow them to aggregate insights, you know, that that work across all these different worlds. So a good planning insight, to give you a great example, is um at Possible, we met with a QSR head of marketing, and she's in a, you know, her brands are like sort of national, about 700 stores around the country. That's enough scale to run, you know, sort of national TV advertising. She knows that, you know, she is running ads in markets where consumers just don't have an opportunity to go to our stores, right? Because there's a store in the area. And so one of the things that we were able to do is, and this is what I mean by having data that goes above the platforms, is look at location data in terms of where her stores were located and who was who which audiences were kind of within a sort of radius where they could go to the store, and overlay that with her streaming investment, with her YouTube investment, with her TikTok investment, and then show her where the biggest areas of wastage are, right? And so then you can start to move from okay, I'm planning at a channel level to okay, I can start to look at these things on a side-by-side level, and maybe that means I'm overinvested in one area or another and I can shift more dynamically, right? That's the like step up and take the thousand-foot view that I think marketers need. And that's just planning, man. Get into activation, there's so much excitement there. Get into measurement, there's a million ways to do that. Those are the types of things that I get pretty excited

Measurement Above Platform Reporting

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 13:03

about.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 13:03

So, so let's continue with that excitement. Let's maybe pick measurement for a second. Everyone loves measurement. What is measurement? Feels harder to answer than what is TV.

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 13:16

Yeah, I think that's probably true, man. Look, I'll tell you what it's not. In a multi-buying platform world, your measurement cannot be platform measured, right? As in, if the primary way you're measuring the success of your campaign is how well that platform is reporting their performance, you are gonna have blind spots, right? It's the like, you know, if you added up all your conversions across like open web, social, CTV, whatever, you you know, your business would be six X the scale that it actually is.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 13:45

It'd be amazing, right? But the reality is it's only what's in the cash register that matters.

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 13:50

That's exactly right. And so again, the story on measurement is the same as the story on planning, which is brands need to elevate themselves above the platforms. They need to own more of the stack themselves, and they need to work more with partners who can work across ecosystems, not within ecosystems. And so I think the story for measurement is what are the measurement solutions that allow you to rapidly get data back to help you optimize campaigns? And what are the measurement solutions that work across all these different channels? And there's still gaps, but you know, we're seeing more and more brands adopt, you know, MMM and kind of digital MMM solutions as sort of one vector of performance here. You know, we're seeing more and more in the measurement RFPs, brands talk about how well are you covering not just CTV, but also social and also YouTube. And then the last thing is we're seeing the walls of these platforms come down a little bit as a response to marketer demand, right? Where Google has, you know, their clean room that they've had for a number of years that's starting to integrate more measurement providers, the ads data hub sort of scenario, super, super powerful data that sits in there. Meta has their own kind of data clean room ecosystem. Cappies are so more and more important. Now you're starting to get more in the weeds, but the point is the walls are coming down on the platforms. And this is where I just encourage ad tech to not see the binary of open web and wall garden and see the spectrum and try to service as much of the spectrum as you can.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 15:22

It's really good. I've recently seen Farmers Insurance, JCPenney. I saw great clips on YouTube. I'm seeing a maturation of the ads that I see on YouTube. And there remains this kind of debate. We saw news, we caught up with our friend Mark Stenberg from AdWeek a couple weeks ago about the the meta settlement and how that could potentially impact platforms like YouTube. And one of the forcing functions I think market wide is that YouTube is being forced to mature as a video and as a television platform. What are the conversations sound like that you have around YouTube?

YouTube As Shorts Plus Big Screen

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 16:01

How do you how do you guide an advertiser through what YouTube is and isn't?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 16:05

Yeah, it's interesting. So I think like one, I'll just say at the macro level, I think you know, YouTube is the most dominant, the largest, you know, the most accessible video platform in the world. You know, we run a global business, we operate in over 20 countries around the world. Many of those countries, when you talk about video, you you start with YouTube and then you then you buy everything else. And so it's a Google and everything else strategy, right? That's that's how dominant YouTube is as a part of the culture. And so I guess what I'll say is when we think about YouTube, we think about sort of three behaviors inside of YouTube. We think of a scrolling behavior, which is your sort of shorts feed to start with. That is a rapidly growing portion of YouTube activity. You know, our data shows it's it's a quarter of time spent is shorts, depending on the market that you're looking at. It's the big screen, so YouTube on TV screens. MIQ's own ads, almost 60% of global ads that we run are on the big screen on on YouTube now. And we run a lot of YouTube activity. And so, you know, that's sort of the second experience, let's say. And then the third experience, I think, is like almost what brands have a traditional kind of legacy view of YouTube being, which is sort of mobile, you know, kind of like horizontal OLV type video. That is a smaller and smaller portion of total percentage of video. And so I think what you're gonna get is in the next couple of years, YouTube really dominate in those two worlds, dominate in the social compete world, which is you know, how do you look at shorts as a complement to your Reels budget? And then in the big screen world, which is already nearly half of time spent, and for many large marketers, 60, 70% of their ad spin.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:05

Wow. Incredible. Thinking thinking a little bit into the future, we're about to turn over the calendar here. October's just around the corner. We're gonna be staring 2027 in the face pretty soon. Any big predictions you've got for the next year, maybe next two years that you see unfolding?

The Walls Come Down And AI Rises

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 18:22

I think my my macro two-year prediction is we're gonna see the walls on these gardens continue to come down. Part of that is some of the like regulatory things that you've called out. But part of that is I think we're on the other end of a natural arc that started around COVID, which was, and and even right before COVID with GDPR, which was the platforms building the walls up as a response to privacy, really locking down the data that they allowed in and out, partly again in a response to privacy and partly because of competitive reasons. And I think what they've recognized is actually the way to succeed is to enable advertisers to accomplish as many of their use cases as possible inside of their platforms. And many of those use cases, we live in a data first world. Many of those use cases can't exist if an advertiser can't bring data in and can't operate with the data partners that they want to operate with. And so I think where like 2021, 2022, you saw platforms really clamp down on the data that they allowed inside their platforms. I think over the next two years we'll start to see walls come down more. And we're already seeing that in pockets, right? But that would be my big prediction.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 19:34

And with that, as the walls come down, that means access to new ad types or just new inventory altogether, more signal specifically. That's something we've heard a lot from guests, is more signal out from the publisher side. Is that one of the things that that you're also looking forward to?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 19:52

Yeah, I think it's all about data and signals in and out. It's not like magically tomorrow you're gonna be able to buy prime video from, you know, another open web platform. But what it is is as a marketer, you have real blind spots in a walled world, right? You're not able to tell if I'm seeing the same user in pick a random publisher Fox as I'm reaching on YouTube, right? And that's a real pain point for advertisers. And actually, that prevents investment both in Fox and in YouTube because they've, you know, advertisers will respond to the data that they're receiving. And so I think what really it means is better ability to plan across these different ecosystems as the platforms allow more data in and share more data out, and it means better measurement within the open web and and wall gardens. And again, I I just I look to like the startup space in ad tech is sort of a really interesting read of what's coming next. All of the like hot startups are, yes, they're all AI, 100%, but they're AI across open web and wall gardens. And I think that's that's a good direction for where the future is headed. It's it's a spectrum, and you've got to service as much of the spectrum as you can.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 21:03

I got to see from a friend yesterday how they're using Claude and the Vibe MCP, and it was mind-blowing. It was incredible. And what they shared was how much time it would have taken them to get to that level of insight, let alone to be able to share that insight back with the client, let alone be able to action on it and to see it all happening in real time, the conversation be elevated, the feedback loop get faster and tighter. That can only be good for what we're calling the open web, the rest of everyone who's not a walled garden, and especially for anyone that might be a walled garden. So if it's good for advertisers, it's good for all of us. Moe, if folks want to learn more about what you're up to, connect with you on socials, learn more about MIQ, where should they go?

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 21:50

Yeah, I think I think that's such a good point. Like in general, you know, what gets talked about in AI a lot is like the efficiency component. And I think the efficiency component is true, but I think the much more exciting thing is like someone who's passionate about a brand, which you would hope your traders are, can do just so, so much more in terms of driving performance with the tools that they have. That's exactly what you're talking about, right? So I I I love that example. I would say if if people want to learn more, we are miku.com and go to the the kind of Sigma sort of page in that. There's tons of cool videos and demos of people doing fun, interesting, cool things with AI. That's

Where To Learn More And Wrap

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 22:30

you know exactly what you're talking about.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 22:31

Amazing. We'll link to that so it's easy to find. Moe, thank you so much for being here.

Moe Chugai, Global Vice President @ MiQ 22:36

Thanks, Sam. Appreciate the time.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 22:37

Absolutely. If you found this conversation to be helpful, share it with a colleague or a client and start a conversation yourself today. We'll see you all next time.