The 2019 asi International Radio & Audio and Television & Video Conferences
6th-8th November 2019, Prague, Czech Republic
We will be publishing our full conference agendas in a few weeks, but even at this early stage we have been impressed by the sheer volume of proposals submitted and the range of issues that have been highlighted by our community. The agenda as a result is already taking on a very clear shape and key topics are emerging.
At the start of this decade we saw a deluge of studies and predictions about what the TV and radio businesses would be like ‘in 2020’. In Prague we will be just a few weeks away, so exactly what state are we in, in terms of the wider audio and video industries and more specifically measurement and data? Are we ready for the new decade?
Radio & Audio Conference
Podcasting is a hot topic and we will have a full session on podcasting as it relates to research and measurement, including pioneering approaches to electronic measurement of actual podcast listening. Talking of electronic measurement, is the portable meter undergoing something of a renaissance? After a few quiet years as a topic at asi, portable meters will be back centre stage as we hear about new services in the Nordics and results from testing in Switzerland and Australia.
Meanwhile, with PPM established in the US for over a decade now, what impact has there been on the radio industry there? We will also have a group of papers looking at how young audiences use audio and the challenges that presents for radio. Radio advertising remains remarkably robust and we’ll be evaluating strong evidence confirming the effectiveness of radio as a vehicle for targeting listeners at the optimum times of the day or week, maximising ROI as a result.
Joint Session
If the cross-platform wars are largely being won in terms of expanding TV measurement into Total Video Measurement, then is cross-media measurement the next logical step? Is the TMAM initiative in the Netherlands, which brings the JICs together, the shape of things to come or a brave experiment? The advertisers are maintaining their pressure for cross-media measurement but three key questions ensue: how can it be achieved, what metric can cover audio, video and text without commoditising them and ‘dumbing down’ media planning and, above all, who pays for it?
Meanwhile, in the current political environment, could the future for increasingly pressurised public service broadcasting lie in subscription models?
Television & Video Conference
SVOD remains an important preoccupation for the video and television industry and we’ll be looking at the latest trends in VOD adoption and usage and the implications for broadcasters. Addressable advertising has been hailed as the future of TV advertising for quite some time now, but just how precisely targeted and effective are the systems that have been built now? We will hear case studies from around the world and ask whether the whole concept of addressable and other forms of adtech challenge the assumptions that underpin how we design currency measurement systems.
At last year’s conference, Steve Wilcox’s paper on the challenges of integrating RPD Set Top Box data into panels (see the presentation here) caused something of a stir and we will look at how those challenges are being overcome in practice in Canada, the US and Switzerland. There is a growing demand for attribution metrics, so we will be asking whether (and how) measurement can move beyond simple presence in the room and handset button pressing to the use of passive measures of presence, attention and involvement.
For the industry currencies, a growing long tail of content, falling response rates and budgetary pressures are converging to drive an increasing dependency on modelling to fill in the holes, but just how far can modelling take us? Are we in danger of handing too much power to the statisticians and black boxes? What are the realistic limitations on how much modelling can replace data collection?
We are increasingly being told that Data Scientists are the new rock and roll stars of the industry, but what exactly differentiates Data Science from research and statistics? We will be setting out to define precisely what ‘Data Science’ is, how it can benefit the video and television industry and hearing from thought leaders in the field along with case studies of its business impact.
Join us in beautiful Prague for a packed agenda in which we promise to leave enough breathing room for debate, networking and knowledge sharing!
The 2019 asi International Radio & Audio and Television & Video Conferences will be held on 6th-8th November in Prague, Czech Republic. Booking is now open: for details of conference and hotel bookings, please go to our Delegate Booking page.