Cross-business data comparability

Origin is the UK implementation of a global approach to cross media measurement driven by the world’s biggest brands. Funded by advertisers, global digital platforms, broadcasters and publishers, the UK programme was expected to provide a blueprint for other countries. By spring 2020, working with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and R&D expertise from Google and Facebook, Origin had agreed a framework for measurement, privacy, technology and governance and was ready to develop a launch plan.

I joined to define the next phase of work, develop the plan, and establish clear governance between the global and UK organisations. Richard, the Programme Director, sought a trusted pair of hands familiar with the challenges of guiding complex technical programmes led by non-technical stakeholders.

My first question was…. “who’s the customer?”

Was it the WFA, Google, the viewer, Sky, Unilever? Some of the biggest multimedia players in the world were involved. We needed to be clear. We also need to distinguish between Origin (the UK venture) and the organisation developing and supporting the technical standards to be rolled out globally. When I joined, the engine was Origin – and it needed to be the WFA or a representative global body that could set standards for Origin to implement, remove concerns about technical bias and privacy that arose because of the involvement of Google and Facebook, and set a standard other countries would want to be part of.

By the time I left, an end to end design document was in place including local and global components, and a global Implementation Team had been established to help shape the approach to piloting and scaling through an initial pilot phase to test a series of proofs of concept building toward an end to end workable prototype and an understanding of the improvements and iterations that would be required to build the measurement system to scale. The team was focused on defining success criteria for the pilot and building a plan in which each party took ownership of at least one key component (including those for global implementation).