I-COM worldmeasurementnews

In UK, Nielsen emerges as leading offer in UKOM planning currency tender

Friday, 29 May 2009 IAB UK writes: The UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM) has moved into a critical stage of its development, and is reaching out to agencies and advertisers to drive the development of an online planning currency, remaining on track for a 2010 launch.

The body has enlisted both the IPA and ISBA to help facilitate discussions and constructive debate between all relevant parties within the marketing community, to ensure there is full agreement and budget to make the system a reality.

All tenders were received at the end of March, and since then UKOM has conducted an in-depth review of the submissions from Gemius/IPSOS, GFK, comScore and Nielsen Online. Following an extensive technical review, Nielsen’s has emerged as the leading tender.

It remains UKOM’s objective that a final announcement will be made in July on the official status of a unified base planning currency for the medium. The product is still on course to be delivered within budget ready for January 2010. More...

Omniture Announces App Measurement for Facebook

OREM, Utah -May 28, 2009 Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ:OMTR), a leading provider of online business optimization software, today announced App Measurement for Facebook, a new solution that enables Omniture SiteCatalyst customers to measure the popularity and success of Facebook applications. With this new App Measurement solution, the powerful analytics, segmentation and reporting capabilities of Omniture SiteCatalyst can now be used to help marketers:
- Better understand Facebook users and their engagement with applications
- Gain insight into the correlation or relationship between Facebook, site traffic and other online channels such as web, mobile, video, etc.
- Make more informed, data-driven social media marketing decisions
- Develop more relevant, user-friendly Facebook applications
More...

Autonomy Interwoven First to Deliver Social Media Analytics That Understands Meaning

LONDON, May 27 - Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis, a new offering that allows businesses to convert the dynamic conversations taking place on social networks into actionable business opportunities. Autonomy Interwoven's web content management (WCM) solution leverages the unique capabilities of Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) to provide a powerful solution for profiting from social media. Social Media Analysis is the only solution that automatically listens to social media content, analyzes the dialogue to understand sentiment, and enables marketers to instantly act on the insights to protect their brand and drive revenue growth. More...

But Who's Counting?

Jason Pontin writes for MIT Technology Review: No one really knows how many people visit websites. No established third-party supplier of audience measurement data is trusted. Internal Web logs exaggerate audiences. This matters to more people than investors....who worry that they have no way to evaluate new-media businesses. The issues involved are technical, and occluded by ugly jargon, but they concern anyone anxious about the future of media as print and broadcast television and radio shrink in importance.

Why care about something as arcane as dodgy audience measurement? Here's why: where content is free, as it is on most websites, the only thing that will pay for quality journalism--or, really, anything valuable at all--is advertising. For most new-media businesses, "display" or banner advertising is the main source of operating revenues. But the general inability to agree on audience numbers is stunting the growth of display advertising. More...

comScore Appoints Industry Measurement Veteran Joe Nguyen as Vice President of Sales for Southeast Asia

RESTON, Va., May 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the appointment of Joe Nguyen as vice president of sales for Southeast Asia, effective today. Mr. Nguyen will be responsible for new business development and expanding sales of comScore products and services throughout the Southeast Asia region.

Mr. Nguyen brings to comScore more than 15 years of sales experience in the Asia-Pacific region and is an active thought leader in the industry, regularly speaking at conferences and holding a seat on the Advisory Board of ad:tech Singapore. He is a veteran of the online analytics industry with experience on both the user and vendor sides of panel-based audience measurement and site-side analytics. Mr. Nguyen is fluent in English, Vietnamese, and German, and proficient in Mandarin Chinese. More...

How Spyware-Driven Forced Visits Inflate Web Site Traffic Counts

Benjamin Edelman, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School writes: But there are other plausible reasons to buy spyware traffic. In particular, cheap spyware traffic can be used to inflate a site's traffic statistics. Buying widespread "forced visits" causes widely-used traffic measurements to overreport a site's popularity: Traffic measurements mistakenly assume users arrived at the site because they actually wanted to go there, without considering the possibility that the visit was involuntary. Nonetheless, from the site's perspective, forced visits offer real benefits: Investors will be willing to pay more to buy a site that seems to be more popular, and advertisers may be willing to pay more for their ads to appear. In some sectors, higher reported traffic may create a buzz of supposed popularity -- helping to recruit bona fide users in the future.

Yet spyware-originating forced-visit traffic can cause serious harm. Harm may accrue to advertisers -- by overcharging them as well as by placing their ads in spyware they seek to avoid. Harm may accrue to investors, by causing them to overpay for sites whose true popularity is less than traffic statistics indicate. More...

Omniture and Kantar Group Partner to Provide Integrated Measurement and Management of Marketing across All Media Platforms - From Online to Offline

OREM, Utah - and NEW YORK - Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), a leading provider of online business optimization software, and WPP's Kantar Group, one of the world's largest research, insight and consultancy networks, today announced a partner relationship that will bring together business critical online analytics and strategic research intelligence under a single marketing platform for integrated reporting and management. Through this ongoing partner relationship, clients can gain a more holistic view of how their online and offline initiatives and branding efforts affect one another. The platform is designed to yield insights that advertisers, agencies and media organizations can use to execute more relevant, personalized marketing campaigns, quickly innovate, and successfully bring to market the products and services their customers want.

Omniture will integrate several Kantar offerings including: online advertising effectiveness and brand measurement from Dynamic Logic; competitive intelligence, audience demographics and behavioral profiling from TNS Media Compete; and attitudinal and lifestyle insights from Kantar's consumer panels, the world's largest online/offline panel collective. These new offers will be delivered to clients through Omniture Genesis, a solution that integrates complementary third-party applications and data with the Omniture Online Marketing SuiteTM. More...

IAB US Releases Social Advertising Best Practices

New York, NY (May 18, 2009) - To define the key elements of social advertising and showcase best practices for consumer control and privacy, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced the release of “Social Advertising Best Practices,” the next step in the IAB’s ongoing efforts to build the advertising infrastructure of social media. It provides publishers, agencies and marketers with recommendations for the successful execution of social advertising campaigns.

“Industry standards are essential to making social media easy, safe and scalable for advertisers,” said Seth Goldstein, CEO of Socialmedia.com and co-chair of the IAB’s UGC Social Media Committee. “The new IAB framework is a critical first step in this direction and we are excited to help enable the next generation of social advertising.”
This document can be found on the IAB website at: http://www.iab.net/socialads
More...

Taking Online-Ad Measurement Beyond the Click

Abbey Klaassen writes for AdAge: The value of using a click to measure online-advertising effectiveness has come under a lot of fire from a lot of different quarters. Those against it note that it does nothing to recognize any prior online or offline marketing activity that might also have contributed to the consumer's click. "It's the closest thing to a standard, but it doesn't mean anything to anybody, and CMOs are just tired of hearing about it," said Andrea Kerr Redniss, senior VP-digital at Optimedia. More...

Internet audience measurement lacks consistency, users say

Anne Cassidy writes for BrandRepublic: The MIA Project Audience and Traffic Measurement global survey found that "the majority of agencies, advertisers and media owners using internet audience measurement are not satisfied with the metrics and information available." Alison Fennah, the co-chair of the MIA Project and executive director of the European Interactive Advertising Association, said: "It shows us that whilst they have a good level of understanding of what the tools are meant to do, they think that finding consistent, clear and comparable data either for one market or for multi-national projects is a major challenge." More + Video...