VIA Interaction

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Leveling the playing field

The Internet offers a great opportunity to measure. You can tell how many people are presented with an advertisement and how many are moved to immediately act by clicking on it.

With a little work, you can follow those people directly through to a sale. With a lot of work, you can even figure out how many people act later on the message they saw.

Contrast that with the world of print and television advertising, where estimates and inferences are often the best you can do. A newspaper gets passed around to a certain number of others, etc.

It's unfair, I say.

Working at an advertising agency, it's been frustrating to see online advertising budgets tyrannized by the relative accuracy of their effectiveness measures (and until recently the relative uncertainty about their effectiveness in branding), while print and advertising budgets seem to sail through on assumptions.

We're not alone at VIA. Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer, said that online represents 18 percent of media consumption but only six percent of media spend.

Either online is a bargain or it's got a lot of catching up to do in spend. You have to go where the eyeballs are.

But there is another interesting development that may help level the playing field: Nielsen is trying to figure out how to track how many people watch television commercials. And the networks are up in arms.

The controversy is covered in today's New York Times in Networks in Uproar on Ratings:

Network and advertising executives have sparred for months over the ratings because they have the potential to become the data that determines the rates that the networks charge for commercials. Traditionally, the rates have been based on the number of viewers who watch the entire program rather than just the ones who stay tuned during commercials.

“It’s a huge change, and there are so many parties involved — it’s not easy to make changes, especially when billions of dollars are at stake,” said Shari Cohen, co-executive director of national broadcast at MindShare North America, which is part of Group M, a WPP Group agency that has publicly urged Nielsen to quickly develop the new ratings. “We still believe that commercial ratings are the way to go.”

posted by Tim Beidel at 11/04/2006 08:35:00 AM

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