Randall Rothenberg: October 2007 Archives

As a former newspaperman, I’m sensitive to complaints that “you missed the story.” But today’s New York Times article on audience measurement discrepancies in interactive advertising did skirt by some of the more important developments in our industry during the past year.

The most significant development: The major audience measurement companies are now working with the IAB to get to the bottom of discrepancies, and we are committed to working together to identify, implement, and educate the marketing and media industries on best and emerging practices in audience measurement.

I’m not a Polyanna – these matters can be very complex, and (let’s face it) disputes between media companies and audience measurement firms are as old as audience measurement itself. But I am confident that, as an industry, we are on our way to reducing measurement discrepancies as an issue.

Discrepancies Matter

I don’t want to dump on The Times story – if you think it’s so easy to summarize a history of the world in 750 words, try it someday. (Then try it five days a week, as some of us had to do in our youth.) But today’s piece did read like a rehash of the complaints and counter-complaints we’ve been hearing and voicing for years: The counts offered by comScore and Nielsen//Netratings differ from publishers’ counts by 30-40-50%... The comScore and Nielsen counts differ from each other… Cogent explanations for the differences can’t be easily had… People at work are undersampled… High-income Web users are undersampled…

For my taste, there was too much emphasis in the piece on at-work populations, and not enough notice of other populations that are chronically undersampled in audience research, notably ethnic and racial minorities and young men. And there was no notice of one of the ways current audience measurement techniques subvert a primary promise of the Web: the ability to match niche buyers and niche sellers through the perfect media vehicle. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of small media sites – the Mom & Pop grocery stores of the Web – likely don’t show up in samples because of their audience size or traffic patterns, thereby robbing advertisers and agencies of potentially valuable matchmaking knowledge (but building a business case for the ad networks and search engines which do deliver ads to and eyeballs from such sites).

We are on the verge of finding a cure for They-Don’t-Get-It Syndrome.

Everyone in marketing during the past 20 years has suffered from – and with – They-Don’t-Get-It Syndrome. It first afflicted the marketing and media industries during the initial wave of agency megamergers in the 1980’s, and became increasingly widespread and painful as the digital era took hold. A malady familiar to students of business dysfunction, its primary sufferers are members of evolving industry value chains. You can tell whether a company has been infected when its executives routinely profess: “Oh, we get what’s happening. The problem is they don’t get it.”

As in: “We marketers get what’s happening, but the agencies just don’t get it.” Or: “We agencies understand the change that’s occurring. But our clients don’t get it.” Or: “We media companies grasp the transformation that’s out there. But the agencies and marketers don’t get it.”

During the three years I worked at the management consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton on a client team serving the Association of National Advertisers, incidence of They-Don’t-Get-It Syndrome increased strikingly. We were doing primary research on the evolution of marketing organizations and capabilities, seeking to codify emerging practices marketers were deploying successfully to drive growth as media, audiences, consumer desires and customer demands were fragmenting. We identified the core capabilities companies needed to shape a “Growth Champions” marketing organization, where the marketing team was the primary growth driver in the firm. And we identified the competencies necessary for Chief Marketing Officers to rise from service provider status to become “Super CMO’s.”

But amid the successes we kept learning about was the insistent drumbeat of “they don’t get it.” So we realized we needed to expand the scope of the research to encompass the entire value chain – marketers, as well as their increasingly necessary partners in growth, agencies and publishers.

Question: When does an industry need a standard?

Answer: Never, if you can help it.

That’s a curious sentiment, considering that the Interactive Advertising Bureau today issued two fundamentally important documents that will help shape industry standards. The first is the Rich Internet Application Ad Measurement Guidelines, which help marketers, agencies, and media determine at what point an ad impression is counted in rich internet application environments built with technologies such as AJAX and JSON. The second is The Video Game Interactive Advertising Platform Status Report developed by the IAB Games Committee, which provides a detailed overview of the current state of advertising in and around video games.

So why call industry standardization into question at exactly the point when the IAB is fashioning vitally important standards? It’s to highlight an unarticulated debate that’s central to the evolution of interactive media and advertising – the debate between standardization and innovation. My strong belief is that standards must support innovation; if they can’t or don’t, their pursuit probably should be abandoned. I’ll explain – and hope I can provoke your response and guidance.