Kantar Reveals Project Moonshot, Launching Industry-Wide Advertising Effectiveness Measurement Platform

Foundational partnerships including Google, Roku, Pandora and Anzu propel the next generation of media planning and optimization

Kantar, the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company, announces a major milestone in its roadmap to deliver the advertising industry’s most advanced independent platform for measuring advertising effectiveness. Project Moonshot is the first advertising industry initiative to establish direct data integrations with companies including Google, Pandora and fast-rising in-game ad platform Anzu, to assess the impact of advertising on brand and sales.

Also being announced today are cookie-less measurement partnerships including Dish, Pinterest, Roku, Snap, Spotify and Twitter. Kantar now has operational partnerships or is in advanced testing with 9 of the top 10 digital publishers and 15 of the top 20 apps and is in advanced onboarding discussions with more than 50 other publishers. The goal is to represent 95% of global digital ad spend by integrating 250 publishers into cross-publisher measurement on the platform by the end of 2021.

• Moonshot was established to achieve three industry-wide goals:
• Establish privacy compliant, next-generation data and technology platform to migrate industry from cookie-based measurement to direct publisher integrations
• Independent ad effectiveness measurement of individual publishers and media companies
• Independent ad effectiveness measurement across all publishers within a media plan including polling solutions for walled garden environments and cross-publisher campaigns.

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Holistic, consistent and transparent measurement of advertising effectiveness across all platforms, including social media platforms and walled gardens, is identified as a major challenge by 75% of the world’s biggest advertisers¹.

Kantar’s research indicates that 80% of marketers trust third party measurement, compared to just over 40% who trust data from individual publisher or media platforms. ‘Getting Media Right’ also identified important priorities for advertisers include the need to prove ROI, attribute brand and sales impact to the right channels and the ability to optimise throughout campaigns. 

Until now, advertisers and media agencies have been able to measure the effectiveness of their online advertising with many publishers, except the walled gardens, using tracking cookies. With the disappearance of the third-party cookie, Kantar has developed new ways to assess effectiveness, using a combination of methodologies including direct integrations and extensively validated probabilistic measurement, heralding a new era for cross-publisher effectiveness. Project Moonshot provides publishers with two cookie-less and privacy-compliant methodologies to deploy measurement and tracking. Both methodologies have at their core Kantar’s permission-based and privacy-compliant Profiles Network of 100 million consumers globally. 

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Jane Ostler, Kantar’s global leader for Advertising Effectiveness, commented ”As digital grows, it’s even more important that publishers can defend their ad revenues with an independent view of performance for advertisers. The gradual removal of third-party cookies from the digital landscape means that methods of online ad effectiveness tracking need to evolve, in a privacy-compliant way. We know that advertisers would ideally like cross-publisher ad effectiveness measurement, and Kantar’s Project Moonshot is making giant steps in that direction.” 

Ms Ostler continued “The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis will inevitably have an impact on advertising spending around the world. We have seen from our own research though that consumers still value well placed, and thoughtful advertising even in a time of crisis. As we begin to emerge from the crisis and move towards recovery, the advertising and creative industries can play an invaluable role in accelerating the recovery, however, advertising departments will be under pressure as never before to prove the value of every £/$/€/¥/₡ they spend. Moonshot is creating the infrastructure to make that possible.”

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