‘This is the first time we’ve really had broad industry support’: VOZ to become official trading currency

VOZ will become the official trading currency from December 29. This will enable trading on “truly national, all-screen Total TV audiences for the first time”, according to OzTAM, and means TV network annual rate negotiations for calendar year 2025 will be based on VOZ Total TV data for the first time.

It will also provide an accurate national viewing picture for the first time, bringing together OzTAM metro TV ratings data and Regional TAM TV ratings data with a new ‘Rest of Australia’ market into one database

In light of this world-first news, Mumbrella spoke to Karen Halligan, OzTAM CEO, to find out more about what this will mean.

L-R Alicia Olson-Keating, Sam Buchanan, Donna Lennox, Karen Halligan and Sophie Madden

This will be the first time that VOZ is the official trading currency. Can you explain what that means for the industry?

At the moment everyone in the market has got access to the TAM data and the VOZ data so that they can do necessary comparisons.

VOZ data is a really, sort of, holistic picture around what’s happening between broadcaster content and BVOD content, but it also de-duplicates between those two. We’re all on a journey as technology changes and behavior changes to tackle that further, and further continue to invest in that, but what it will mean is post-analysis, the rate cards, the agency buying will all be done on VOZ currency and no longer on the TAM currency So it’ll be a more accurate reflection of what’s actually happening within the marketplace for consumer behaviour, and it will be the first step towards tackling what’s really hard to identify globally, which is the duplication between BVOD and broadcast content.

What does this mean practically for advertisers?

If we get into it from an advertiser point of view, it allows advertisers to optimise their television investment across platform, and with the investment we’ve made in streaming TV meters soon, they’ll be able to optimise across device. So, to understand where to best capture their audiences in the broadcast context. For advertisers, that’ll also be a more accurate reflection of where their money’s going and how that actually works for them, so that they can really understand the accountability.

For agencies, the third-party software suppliers have been providing some enhanced modules. So, the analysis of where spend, where advertisers are going, where they can find audiences. And then for agencies, they’ll still be able to buy and trade in the normal mechanism, but they’ll be able to get a step closer to actually being able to work across platform in a more seamless fashion, because it’s all out of that one source.

I imagine this was a lot of work to get this up and running

The team have been building VOZ, as you would know, and there’s obviously been significant and continued investment from from our agency partners and all of our clients in the build of this, and that’s obviously been quite a journey.

In relation to this year, the approach that we’ve taken as a team is to do extensive collaboration and change management with the industry. So really understand what they need to make it a success. When do they want this to happen? What assets would that look like? To get their support around the date and the timing so we’ve done a series of broad stakeholder engagements.

We did a big workshop, which the MFA have been fantastic as a partner for us, they put on a workshop with us, where we worked with the trading team and the technology team to understand requirements. We then took that to all of the chief investment officers and say, ‘If we deliver on the things that your team asked for do you support this transition date?’ which they all did, which we’re very grateful for

We then went to the IMAA and consulted with them for their member agencies to make sure that they also had a voice in and how this actually worked and then we have been collaborating with the AANA to ensure that we know what clients want to know about this change

So that work has been extensive. This is the first time we’ve really had broad industry support around the transition, the date, and then also all of the change management pieces that will go around that – training information sheets and the like, which are all in development at the moment.

Australia is possibly the first country in the world to do something of this scale and this holistic. Have you heard from similar bodies elsewhere?

On a regular basis. I mean, it was very only recently that we were presenting into the entire Japanese market and all of their technology partners around what we’ve created because they’re so interested in what’s happening in this market. All of the bodies get together at the conference at the end of this year – and we’ve been asked to come and talk about it.

I mean, all of the media owners and joint industry committees around the globe are fronting into the same challenges that we that we are one of the benefits that we’ve got in the way that VOZ has been constructed is it’s got the ability to ingest different data sets, and to do a number of different things that positions that’s really well for the future and that’s something that we’re really excited about. We get an enhanced proposition for now, but we’ve got a really strong platform as we move into working more broadly with streaming services, other data partners, big data and the like – so we’re set up for that future roadmap as well.

Nathan Jolly

Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.

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topics Karen HalliganOzTamVOZ

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