Can metrics catch up with media technologies' rapid growth?

Last week, we looked at how increased bandwidth and multiple attribution protocol will impact on the development of metrics in 2008. In this article, we look at changes in three other key areas.

Analytics AOR
We believe that advertisers will need a new agency of record (AOR) -- a single agency responsible for coordinating efforts across all agencies of a specific client -- soon. This will be an analytics AOR. Already, there are issues with multiple agencies claiming attribution for their various channels. Under MAP, there are going to be problems if there are multiple tags or multiple agencies responsible. If you doubt this, try launching a DRTV (direct response television) campaign, an ROI web campaign and a search campaign with three separate agency vendors. The new analytics AOR will need a dashboard so that the lead analytics agency, the other agencies and the client can all access and see the data they need to see when they need to see it.

Dashboards
Most of the newer analytics tools for emerging media technologies come with convenient dashboards for reporting. The more traditional tools such as third party ad servers need to play catch-up in this arena. And, there are a number of entities which are attempting to develop a global dashboard which will take inputs from all of your digital campaign sources. The ability to have a unified reporting dashboard, with different views for the analyst, manager and client will be necessary to deal with the ever increasing amount of data.

Emerging media technology metrics
As stated above, the new emerging media technologies all have their own aspects that need measurement. In addition, there needs to be some work to map these measurements back to "traditional web" metrics. Questions such as where does the opportunity to see the ad (OTS) occur, what are the proxies for clicks and is the viewing of a branding message within the new medium equivalent to a site visit need to be resolved. Some of this will be made easier by the fact that established companies like Nielsen and comScore are involved with ET metrics. In addition, Quantcast is very active in measuring videos, widgets and other flash-based media.

But there are many other companies involved in ET metrics. Companies like TubeMogul for viral video distribution, DoubleFusion and Massive for video games, Radian6 for social networks, Technorati, MotiveQuest and Umbria for blogging, Telephia (owned by The Nielson Company) for mobile, Edison for podcasting and many others including a lot of publisher- or provider-centric metrics.

All of these and other new ones that come up need to be normalised within each category, and as they map back to other digital metrics.

The tasks ahead of us are significant. Not only do digital agencies and their clients need to spend time understanding the new metric landscape, there is a major need for involvement of all in order to achieve some semblance of standardisation. If you have any interest in metrics at all, get involved with your national or regional associations. Insist that study and standardisation be part of their agenda. Ensure that your organisation is communicating with others in other countries. In the U.S., the IAB, AAAAs, ARF, MRC and ANA all have stakes in this arena. In addition, there are growing associations for each of the ETs. I plan to continue to write and speak about these issues within various venues. I look forward to engaging others in a dialogue to move the metrics needle ahead and into the green.

David L. Smith is CEO and founder of Mediasmith, Inc. Read full bio.