RSSSteve Fredericks of TNS Calls Out IAB at min Day
On the second panel of the day, moderated by Steve Greenberger, EVP and media director at SLG Advertising, Steve Fredericks of TNS Media Intelligence, the massive French media measurement firm, called out IAB (the interactive advertising bureau, the trade organization for the online advertising industry).
“IAB needs to step up and come up with parameters and metrics to measure online activity. Standard metrics don’t exist today,” said Fredericks.
In a later panel with Debbie Solomon of Mindshare and Bibhash Das of Omniture, both panelists discussed the problems with unique visitors and page views and other traditional metrics used to measure online activity. They threw around terms like “unique browsers” and the more familiar “engagement.”
But what do these things mean? And how are they measured?
IAB is in position to call for industry standards here, and I’d like to join Fredericks in imploring them to do so. Maybe one year ago, it would have been hard to make such a request, but we now know so much more about how Web sites are utilized and how to filter for certain kinds of traffic—basically, how to measure.
The challenge of measuring mobile engagement is looming on the horizon as that segment of the advertising industry ramps up. Let’s get online measurement right first.
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I challenge the viewpoint that Unique Visitors or Unique Browsers isn’t a valid measurment tool. It’s the same idea that propogates behind print measurement — I may sell 5000 magazines in a month, but how am I to tell how many people actually read those 5000 magazines?
Using UVs or UBs is far more valid than anything that currently exists for the offline world, and any decent modeling department can model the ‘read’ rates easily based on such metrics. Instead of complaining about “measurement”, I challenge you all to come up with actual plans of action based on such metrics. Too often, companies and indivuals will shield themselved from actually doing any real work by complaing “the data isn’t right” or “I don’t have all the real information”. There’s too much fear from a middle-management standpoint to actually make changes in products and content, and to protect themselves, people will make such complaints.
Stop complaining. Start acting.