Hardly anyone is happy with the current state of digital audience metrics. Different vendors come up with wildly different totals for unique visitors per month at a given site. The counts are inflated, to varying degrees, by double-counting individuals who visit from multiple computers or delete cookies.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), with two other advertising trade groups, announced a major initiative a week ago titled “Making Measurement Make Sense.” So why might this one succeed, where extensive IAB efforts in the past have fallen short? I asked Sherrill Mane, the IAB executive in charge of the project.
“A number of reasons,” she told me in a phone interview, “but I think we are at a tipping point to clear up 15 years of confusion. All the constituencies (from advertising and media companies) are on board.”
Many agreed that competing vendors and frequent tweaking of methodology has been a large part of the problem to date. But the project’s mission is not to choose one best among the vendors and push all parties to fall in behind that choice, she said.
Rather she envisions a set of recommendations on standards that would drive the vendors to more uniform measures. She added that given the nature of digital media, a good set of standards in 2011 could be obsolete in another couple of years.
So part of the strategy is to establish a standards board with broad buy-in from advertising and media interests that will refine specifications for reliable metrics as circumstances change.
The project has strong support from the Newspaper Association of America and its current chairman, E.W. Scripps executive Mark Contreras. Contreras defined improved metrics as one of the goals for his year at NAA’s helm back in December 2009 and laid out what he saw as the problem in a Biz Blog interview in January 2010.
He told me recently that not only does NAA support the idea of the initiative, it has “passed the hat” among major member companies and raised about $100,000 in support of the work.
Contreras has a double agenda. Better, more uniform metrics would allow for better conversations with advertisers about the audience they reach with digital buys. He would also like to strengthen the industry’s ability to document its combined print and digital reach, mostly to counter newspapers’ image of pervasive decline.
“I truly believe that the industry has never reached as many people as we do now,” Contreras told me, but the online metrics supporting the case are wobbly. (The NAA did its part to add to the confusion last year when it switched from Nielsen to comScore for a measure of industry reach, kicking up the total to a much higher number than previously).
Contreras is not as vendor-neutral as some others. Omniture has “an 80 percent installed base in the industry and the trust of publishers,” he said. He also plans to talk to the board of the Audit Bureau of Circulations late this month about how to extend their “gold standard” measure of print circulation to a measure of total audience.
I also spoke with Mike Lavery, president of ABC, who was aware of the new effort and its support from NAA and similar organizations representing the audit bureau’s magazine clients. (ABC is itself governed by a board made up of roughly equal numbers of advertisers and media executives).
Lavery like Mane hopes the effort stops short of anointing a best vendor. “ABC’s philosophy continues to be the same as it has always been — that is to be source-agnostic” as long as good practices, which can be audited, are followed. Currently ABC accepts estimates of online audience from a number of vendors chosen by member publications.
In practice, he added, Scarborough has tended to be dominant among newspapers (as Nielsen is with television). Scarborough’s main business is measuring local markets, and its total reach measure works well as an estimate of print-digital penetration in a given market.
But it misses the broader reach of some sites — like NYTimes.com and The Washington Post — to a national or international audience and leaves out altogether The Wall Street Journal and USA Today since they do not have a home local market.
Also, Lavery said, smaller newspapers think that panel-based or hybrid measures, like Scarborough’s and comScore’s, have too small a sample to accurately capture the size of their digital audience.
Mane said that she expects a first report — done with outside consultants from Bain and Company — to be complete in roughly six months. Until then it will be difficult for even the participants to envision what final recommendations may emerge.
And the question lingers whether media industries, which historically have trouble agreeing on common solutions to operating business issues, will be ready to trade in a bit of autonomy in the interest of better digital measurement.
