iMedia Connection talked with Bolger about her recent appointment as Executive Vice President of Agency Development, and the significance of her role.

Last week, comScore Networks Inc. announced the appointment of Lynn Bolger as Executive Vice President of Agency Development, a newly created position. Bolger comes to the organization with more than 15 years of experience at major advertising agencies, and a decade of experience in digital media. She is both a traditional media expert and a new media pioneer, as well as a recognized leader and policy-maker in the online marketing industry, having held positions on the Steering Committees of both FAST and the IAB. iMedia Connection spoke with Bolger about her move and the significance of her new role.

iMedia Connection: What, specifically, is your role as Executive Vice President of Agency Development?

Bolger: I’m here to help communicate and drive the agency product and the agency sales effort. As much as anything, I’m a facilitator to work between and translate between the agency community, the publishing community and the research world here at comScore to insure that the products we develop best serve the needs of the agency and that we’ve got media planning, buying and sales tools that make sense for the publishing side as well.

iMedia Connection: So you’ll be in on the development of product as well as being a liaison between comScore and agencies?

Bolger: Yes, I think I’ll get my two cents in.

iMedia Connection: Of all the things to do out there, why take this position?

Bolger: I’ve been at this for a long, long time and I think everyone who works in the interactive world has some degree of frustration in terms of the slow pace of evolution of trying to get this business into the mainstream and at the top of the heap and top of mind as far as the rest of the marketing community goes. I think that here is where I have the best opportunity to make a difference, both for myself as far as having a fascinating and fun job as well as for the industry because there are really unique data here and we have the potential to tie together some of those magical pieces as far as audience exposure data and its potential impact on transaction sales, responses and so forth.

ComScore has a panel of a million and half people for whom they’re tracking all Internet activity and we’re working to marry that information up with the Media Metrix audience data. That’s the real promise of the data: marrying up syndicated response data (response in terms of actual outcome of the marketing activity) with syndicated audience data.

iMedia Connection: You’ve been committed to the online space for a long time, having served on numerous steering committees and speaking at industry events. How do you feel this position will help you continue this advocacy role?

Bolger: I absolutely think I’ll be all that much more involved at an industry level developing tools that will move the business model forward.

iMedia Connection: What made you decide to leave the agency world to take this position?

Bolger: It was a challenge I just couldn’t resist. I have a long background in research and the body of knowledge that’s here, the brains that are here, and the fun to be had, I couldn’t resist it. It’s as much about the intellectual challenge as anything. There is fun, fun data here that can be applied to the whole industry.

iMedia Connection: Why comScore? What is it about the organization that you believe in?

Bolger: It’s the value of the data and the brains behind it.

iMedia Connection: Having been in this industry for a decade now, where do you think we are on the maturation scale? What are the issues that still need to be addressed?

Bolger: That depends on who we are; how do you define we? Part of the difficulty in answering that is that everything related to online has always been put in this one digital bucket and that’s not necessarily the way things are going to evolve. The marketing applications that can be applied online across the full spectrum from direct mail to classified advertising to you name it, we’ve got it – promotions, event marketing, whatever – the different pieces will evolve at different rates. One of the issues for the business is that both on the service side and on the selling side things have been structured around a big digital bucket and I think that as the specialties move back into their respective traditional disciplines, we’ll see some progress moving forward.

We’re right on the brink and I really feel that. Coming from an agency that was mostly a traditional agency, I saw the level of understanding and interest from traditional marketers, traditional planners, and traditional research folks growing. They’re beginning to understand that, “yes this is something that is not going away, and something that we need to understand, and something that we need to equate with traditional media.” There’s a very high level awareness out there at this point. The solutions aren’t quite in place yet, but they’re coming within the next 12 to 18 months, I believe.

That’s not to say there aren’t already a lot of capabilities out there right now, like the ability comScore has to measure groups of people who are critical but have been previously immeasurable, such as accurate measurement of the workforce, the university audience, and local markets. And then various measures of outcome available, such as actual purchase behavior both online and offline, or subscriptions, retention, customer loyalty and things like that. Many clients are using these but we still see enormous opportunity to increase and accelerate that adoption.

iMedia Connection: So, what do you most want to accomplish in this position?

Bolger: Help the agency world, or the online advertising world, agree on some general operating principles for buying and selling online media. And I’ll be very heavily focused on education and standardization.