The time is now for advertisers to lean into new currencies for cross-platform campaigns.

That's the call to action from NCBUniversal EVP of Measurement and Impact Kelly Abcarian and iSpot Founder and CEO Sean Muller. The two companies recently completed a massive-scale new currency test that engaged over 150 brands as the TV ecosystem evolves its approach to measurement and currency. In this fireside chat, Kelly and Sean walk through the key findings and conclusions of the tests and discuss what comes next.

Watch the full conversation above.

Change is here. In 2024 there will be 100% new currencies.
- Kelly Abcarian

With sweeping, seismic changes facing TV measurement—as Abcarian pointed out, by 2024, even the legacy measurement provider will be transforming to meet the needs of modern media—NBCUniversal has spent many months leaning in and embracing change, testing new currencies and helping advertisers learn how to measure the effectiveness of their cross-screen ads in a multi-currency environment. Together with iSpot, they have enabled more than 150 brands and 65+ advertisers participated in massive-scale "test and learn" opportunity to try new measurement currencies.

We're moving away from these proxy-based, disconnected legacy measurement systems, to [measurement that's] truly unified...measuring exactly what advertisers care about most: their ads.
- Kelly Abcarian

After months of testing with dozens of advertisers, NBCU and iSpot found a few key conclusions, one being that "most advertisers have been very apprehensive to invest in OTT at the impression weight that they really need to to drive the most effectiveness and impact for their campaigns," Abcarian explained. The vast majority of advertisers were linear-heavy and therefore weren't optimizing reach and frequency as well as they could.

We saw that almost all advertisers were underinvested in OTT in terms of opportunity for much more optimal reach against their target audience.
- Sean Muller

The solution? Advertisers need to break down the siloes and consider campaigns holistically. "If we're siloed in the linear world and buying digital separately, we're really setting ourselves back at this moment in time," Muller explained.

After many successful tests and a lot of learnings, NBCUniversal and iSpot are turning their attention to enabling new currencies and delivering needed insights for advertisers to more effectively plan, execute and measure across screens. "There's been a lot of testing and learning," Muller said, "but actually there are advertisers and agencies that are leaning in on transacting [on new currencies] this year."

For advertisers, the time is now to get started.

The advertisers, agencies and media companies that lean in the hardest on this will be the winners, because everybody is going to change at some point...you have to make a choice if you want to be a leader in this arena of you want to wait and see.
- Sean Muller