Mediasmith Anvil
	Volume 7, Issue 3                     May 14, 2008

A Note from Barcelona

By David L. Smith

Part 1 of 2

Actually, I am back in San Francisco, but have been meaning to re-cap the International Conference on Online Media Measurement (I-Com) that took place in Barcelona mid-February.

This conference really lived up to its name. Two hundred people from all around the world, including a heavy European representation, a good number of U.S. companies and a wide variety of other areas from Egypt to China. Major research and analytics vendors like comScore, Nielsen, DoubleClick, Atlas, Insight Express and TNSgallup were there. Many agencies were represented as this is “their” conference, although the underwriters are the various trade organizations including the IAB and the various worldwide flavors of same as well as the various advertising associations around the world. There were 35 in all, though notably, the ARF and the AAAAs were NOT in attendance. The MRC was there in the person of George Ivie. In addition, a great number of metrics companies that I was not previously familiar with, like Gemius, Spring, MetrixLab, wunderloop, Attentio and Nedstat, were in attendance. The U.S. trade press surprisingly took a pass.

The goals included setting the direction of measurement. The conference lasted three days and was jam-packed starting at 9 a.m. (early for Spain) and going past 6 p.m. most days with few breaks.

So what did we talk about?

We talked about engagement. Best quote was from Nate Elliott of Jupiter who said that “engagement is a tactic, not a metric.”

We talked about the frustration of agencies in having no vendor providing true integration solutions and how agencies are building their own due to the lack of a unified industry solution. They are concerned about the “Tower of Babel” that results from this, a phrase that was uttered more than once from the stage and over coffee.

As is common at a research meeting, everything was up for questioning including “What is a medium?” Should we be including trade shows?

Rick Bruner (DoubleClick) and John Chandler (Atlas) gave a great update on Attribution Management, a far superior term to Multiple Attribution Protocol, which we have been using. DoubleClick will start to include natural search as well as paid search in its tracking. Rick and John talked about how fully 71% of search clicks are navigational (people who have seen other messages and are using branded search to get someplace). They opined that about half the cost of a campaign is navigational. And reinforced that conversion goes up 22% if you add a display component. A lot of work needs to be done on this — but major factors in conversion appear to be frequency, multiple sites, recency, ad size, richness of creative and reach/quality of reach.

A major point of discussion was the MIA project, which is the Worldwide Audience Currency System (WACS). They are talking about not a single currency, but transparency between. Like $ for yen or gold for oil.

The discussion of differing languages and terms was music to my ears. One example is the misuse of the term reach. Some takeaways on this: There needs to be a universal glossary. We need to get back to basics and learn what other media have already defined (see reach above) and we need to look to the future and determine what definitions will be required in the digital space.

Part 2 covers more in this space about the MIA project and other issues uncovered at I-Com.

Mediasmith Morsel

According to China’s Xinhua News Agency, as reported by DMNews, the nation has 221 million Internet users—totaling precisely the number of Internet users in the US, as estimated by Nielsen Online. The difference being that the Chinese number reflects a very low penetration rate. Search, however, is still relatively young in China. In 2007, China IntelliConsulting Corporation published a survey from a random sample of 2,800 users in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. The topline results included:

• Most Internet users stick to one engine (64.3%)
• Baidu was the most frequently used engine (82.3%), followed by Google (39.6%)
• In looking at the makeup of Google and Baidu users, Baidu appears to be more popular with the younger set (18-24)
• Baidu also does well with “high-end” users – those more than 25 years old with a four-year degree and good wages

Source: China’s New Bragging Rights, written by Sara Holoubek for DMNews.com

Part 2 of 2

Part 1 covered the International Conference on Online Media Measurement (I-Com).

According to George Ivie, head of the MRC, an important part of this initiative is the perspective. Ivie discussed how the perspective needs to be one of advertising orientation. This theme was echoed throughout the conference. Much of the web research we have seen to date (comScore, NetRatings) has been site centric. Ivie and many others at the conference believe that the client, rather than server perspective, is necessary to provide accurate advertising metrics and metrics that are as comparable as possible to other media. This is a similar approach to the one the MRC took on impression counting—not counting the request or the send from the server, but counting the impression as far down the line as possible. Ideally, an impression should be when an ad is fully loaded on the browser.

There was also talk in the conference about the changing Web or Web 2.0. As you may be aware, the new technologies (Ajax, Flash, JSON, etc.) deliver greater interactivity within a single page. Pages can now be entirely self-contained applications. Page content can change when you click and drag or mouse-over. Flash games run in a single page of html. Because of all this, we need to move away from page impressions and other volume metrics and find something else. This has brought into question the viability of the pageview as a metric. One suggestion is that unique users and some measure of time spent is a possible solution.

The time-spent metric is an important issue, as it is potentially the default new replacement for pageviews. One attendee debunked this in an amazingly logical way. He opined that, in the case of an expert user who is a heavy user of a specific site, that user gets in and out of the site quite quickly and accomplishes his or her work with ease. A less experienced user might take much more time to do the same thing. The risk then being that time spent could value occasional visitors to a site more so than the experienced ones.

An observation separate from the conference: Take a look at Quantcast and its metric relative to the number of times a unique user comes to a site in a month. Quantcast separates it into 1x per month, 2-30x per month and 30+x per month. It stands to reason that we cannot mount an effective campaign against those who have only visited once a month. I'd like to suggest that we embrace the Quantcast metric of 2+ times or more per month and call it "effective unique users." Use of time spent against effective unique users might be a much more relevant metric.

There was also talk about the newer metrics companies like Quantcast that are attempting to measure from a census standpoint, not a sample standpoint. With these services (and there are already multiple companies who claim this capability), there will need to be a standard established and agreed to that provides an estimation process for cookie problems, accounting for cookie deletion.

Mobile was an important topic, too. In 2007, there were 1 billion mobile phones sold in the world, while the PC number was 250 million. Active usage of mobile phones worldwide is about 2.6 billion, with an estimated 1.2 billion with Internet connections. Of course at some point, the distinction between what is a mobile phone and what is a PC will become an increasingly definitional issue. Where is the line drawn between a fully functional PDA, iPhone and a very small computer? A topic for another day.

Mediasmith Morsel

Online ads drive online sales. But did you know that they can be even more powerful in driving off-line sales? According to Magid Abraham, president and CEO of comScore, “Even in terms of raw increases … online ads had a bigger impact on off-line than on online sales in a majority of our studies.”

In the collective results of 18 studies comparing the sales revenue from customers exposed to online display ads, search ads, or both, with control groups that did not see the ads, comScore found a very interesting statistic. The off-line revenue of those who saw both search and display ads, in the same time period, increased almost 300% over that of the control groups.

The take-home lesson is that yes, search ads do have a greater impact than display ads, but by using both types of ads together in a single campaign, your sales revenue can be impacted online and off-line by a greater amount than either of them separately.

Source: The Off-Line Impact of Online Ads, by comScore president/CEO Magid Abraham, writing in the April, ’08 Harvard Business Review

As with the PC-based Web metrics, there is a great need to establish standard metrics in the mobile space. This is much more difficult than the PC world, where there are at best only 2-3 operating systems and a couple of major browser entries. In the U.S. alone there are hundreds of different mobile configurations.

Greg Stuart, former CEO of the IAB, made a very logical presentation on this topic. He pointed out that we have a clash between media researchers and technologists in the mobile space and that they represent very different skills that are invariably present in different people. Once again, the specter of a global Tower of Babel was presented. This, combined with multiple companies that are already providing proprietary measurement, protection of technology by the hardware and the phone companies, and the difficulty to even get proper motivation and support, makes the mobile goal of setting up, guiding and managing the mobile industry to develop strategically advantageous global currency standards as stated by Stuart a daunting task.

Video games are another major platform that was discussed. Once again, the fact that we are talking different research and metrics languages came into play. Mobile is facing many of the same issues as the PC and Web. There is a need voiced for more openness, more standards and education. In addition, the use of census rather than sample, joined by the fact that we need to measure everything from an advertising and user standpoint, not site standpoint were all part of the discussion. Also, there was the issue of frequency capping which needs specific attention in the game space due to the way that game advertising is currently bought and sold combined with the frequency of play on the part of the consumer.

The mobile goal, as stated by Shelby Cox of EA and Ken Ripley of IGA, is to be able to book mobile impressions like trying to fly from Memphis to New York: to go in, look at the choices and book it.

For WebTV and IPTV there was an observation that downloads are one thing, plays are another. The panel discussing this topic wanted to see what percentage is played, when, how often, completion rates, etc…

Other issues like cross-media effectiveness, understanding of the relationship between brand and direct response were also raised at the conference.

I'm going to wrap up this report as it is already about twice as long as the average Metrics Insider. I feel like I have only scratched the surface of the conference, and I apologize to the speakers and topics that space did not permit me to cover. But then, you really had to be there. See you at the next I-Com.

Mediasmith Morsel

“Almost two-thirds of Americans have had some experience with mobile Internet use, and the adoption trend is most pronounced among teens and young adults, according to Pew Research Center. About 60% of adults 18 to 29 use text messaging every day, compared with only 14% of their parents. Nearly one-third of young adults use mobile Internet. This is the future, because people take their media habits with them as they age.”

(Source: BusinessWeek Viewpoint, 4/28/08)

This isn’t surprising. But when usage is delved into further, the assumption of the youthful market is challenged:

The greatest use of a mobile service in the US is SMS (Short Message Service). 82% of those under 25 use SMS and only 13% of those over 65. However, the distribution of SMS users shows that just over 50% are age 35 and over.

(Source: Limbo’s Mobile Advertising Report, 1st quarter, 2008)

Caveat: It pays to look a little closer at the data. The added suggestion from the Mobile Advertising Report is to age-target without pidgeon-holing as a key to successful advertising.

Part 1 of this article originally appeared in MediaPost's Online Metrics Insider on February 12, 2008. Part2I appeared in MediaPost's Online Metrics Insider on February 19, 2008.

David L. Smith is CEO and Founder of Mediasmith, Inc. -- a full service advertising media agency, specializing in digital media with an increasing emphasis on emerging technologies. Mediasmith is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

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