Five Questions For Ken Norcross, VP, Data Licensing & Strategy

Jun 01, 2023

Ken Norcross, Vice President, Data Licensing and Strategy, Inscape

Ken Norcross is a results-oriented revenue and operations leader responsible for developing growth strategies at VIZIO’s Inscape data division, a leading provider of automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies and TV data. Norcross helps drive the data-driven strategy for VIZIO’s CTV business and leads data monetization for third-party measurement platforms powering the future of TV currency.

We emailed Ken Norcross five questions about Smart TV’s and video audience measurement. Below are the answers.

It seems that there is more data available today than ever before in order to help media owners and marketers to make the best possible decisions – from panels to these big data sets. How is Inscape’s ACR data helping your clients and what are you doing differently than other measurement firms?

Norcross: With first-party viewing data from more than 22 million Smart TVs, Inscape is very much at the center of what could be seen as a measurement revolution. Our data not only captures viewing across all connected devices – including cable boxes, over-the-air antennas, DVRs, etc., as well as within the TV’s native viewing apps. It’s helping our many partners with their own solutions, reducing the barriers to produce currency-grade measurement and fostering the competitive environment the industry needs after decades of measurement stagnation.

This is important, because with an explosion in both the amount of content available to consumers today, as well as the ways in which to connect to that content, it’s become abundantly clear that In order to comprehensively measure across platforms, the industry needs a solution that relies on big data. The traditional use of panels only based on small panel projections, which often end up with low identity match rates and creates large discrepancies between delivered and measured ad impressions. ACR technology that provides a large, truly representative data set over these platforms makes the television industry a lot smarter and gives both marketers and publishers a chance to capitalize on and reach the consumers they are intending to.

What do you see as the biggest challenge the industry is facing right now?

Norcross: There are two main challenges, really. We are all witnessing a dramatic shift to streaming from linear TV. In fact, Streaming has been one of the biggest disruptors in modern media consumption. It has given consumers the power to choose from an increasingly global pool of content options – more titles than ever before and growing – as well as determine when and how to watch that content. However, there have been challenges in measuring linear and streaming comparably and this is what is needed – scalable, interoperable, transparent TV viewing data based on deterministic and consistent identifiers to solve for variability and conflicting results over these two platforms. A solution that does that will allow publishers to finally overcome misrepresented inventory and leverage their own first party data for more accurate planning and measurement.

Smart TVs have become the standard for new consumer purchases and act as a hub for streaming and connecting – have you seen consumer behavior shift because of that?

Norcross: Smart TVs are now the norm and not the exception and with apps on the home screen, they are really the hub and point of entry for a lot of content connectivity. Want to binge that new show that dropped on Netflix NFLX or Hulu? Consumers can go right through the home screen app. Want to watch the local news? There are apps for that too.

Previously, cable set-top boxes were that hub for many American consumers to connect with their content, but we know cable companies have seen subscriber attrition. At the same time, we have seen dramatic growth in Smart TV penetration and usage.

A recent analysis we performed found that in Q1 2023, streaming channels secured the most prominent spot in U.S. households for the first time ever. Driven by the increased use of smart, connected TVs as that central content hub, the share of viewing for streaming officially outpaced wired cable and satellite as the predominant source for U.S. viewers. Specifically, from the first quarter of 2023 to that same quarter in 2022, streaming captured about a 4% viewership share from cable/satellite, increasing its total share from 49% to about 53%, while cable/satellite’s share decreased from 42% to 38% year-over-year. I think we will not only continue to see this trend play out, but it will put needed pressure on the industry to find a solution that accurately accounts and measures streaming and linear in a deduplicated and comparable fashion.

Why is measurement based on ACR data so important to brands and marketers and, really, the industry as a whole?

Norcross: It’s about scale and representation, together. Scale is massively important when it comes to measuring true audiences and the fact that Inscape has over 22 million TVs as its source of truth, compared to traditional focuses on thousands. And to bolster that, last December Inscape launched our National Representative Panel (NRP), a proprietary TV audience weighting solution designed to build an ACR dataset that is nationally representative of the U.S. population. By using advanced data science, each TVs within the Inscape TV panel are now assigned demographic markers derived from anonymized households matching with industry-trusted identity providers to generate audience attributes for age, gender, household income and ethnicity. The end result is the near elimination of the slight differences in individual and household representation found across audience segments, and produces a dataset that is largely equal to the U.S. Census data. This is just one example of how Inscape is committed to capturing everything that is beyond the TV glass to get additional information in order to help marketers’ holistically understand and decide around their cross-platform campaigns and understand audiences at the most granular level.

Inscape has continued to evolve over the years and remain pertinent to the industry – what are some of the things we can look forward to hearing from you about in the future?

Norcross: I think as the industry begins to understand that a panel-first approach to measurement – in an era when there is more content to watch than ever before – needs some re-thinking, Inscape’s data will only become more relevant as measurement providers seek to unlock the scale, representation and granularity of our 22 million opt-in Smart TV devices. We’re also committed to leveraging what we are seeing from the consumers in our coverage area and excited to begin releasing insights in order to help our clients and the industry understand the dynamic between streaming and linear TV, how CTV is playing in this space, the growth of FASTs and where we see consumer shifts in the future. We’re also dedicated to creating solutions to help the industry fully capitalize on streaming, rather than having it be an obstacle to cross-platform measurement, so we think the latter half of 2023 is an exciting one!