#ARFAM8 : A Path to a Multi-Platform Solution

By David Brudenell

Following a lively introduction by ARF’s Chief Research Officer, Colleen Fahey Rush and the ARF’s new Chief Executive, Gayle Fuguitt, the keynote introduction by ESPN in partnership with Arbitron and comScore dove quickly and deeply into Project Blueprint; a proposed industry-first single source measurement platform across TV, Radio, PC, Smartphone and Tablet.

With audience mobile phones and tablets elevated snapping pictures of the preliminary findings, Artie Bulgrin and Glenn Enoch from ESPN painted a promising picture of initial findings of how consumers interact and engage with multiple devices. Beginning with the data-heavy theme offered by the opening presentations, Project Blueprint showed how people consume content cumulatively across devices. A powerful small insight for the ESPN team was that for highly engaged consumers of ESPN those with 4+ devices were consuming 38+ hours of content.

This “nationally projectable”, cross-platform measurement platform experiment offers promise for advertisers to more deeply understand consumers behaviors in a increasingly diversified content consumption marketplace.