The View From Advertising Week; Nielsen Sues ComScore

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

You Got Tencent?

At New York’s Advertising Week, Chinese tech giant Tencent continued the coming-out party it began three months ago in Cannes. Tencent, which owns WeChat and a bunch of other apps, has enormous power for marketers because it lets consumers perform the same activities they do in the physical world. Because consumers can do more, the data is extremely rich and consolidated in one system, “so you don’t get these frictions in the way you want to market,” Dentsu Chief Strategy Officer Nigel Morris said during a Monday session. China is the only ad market in the world where significantly more spend and consumption happens online than in more traditional channels, and “both Tencent and Alibaba have done more to allow people to integrate their systems than Google and Facebook,” said GroupM Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman. But will those wonderful capabilities ever migrate to the Western world? Outlook still unclear. Related: Tencent made a splashy entrance into the US market last week with new ad tech tools [AdExchanger coverage]. Also related: GroupM inks ad targeting deal with Alibaba. Read the release.

Keep Your Clicks

Traditional digital marketing metrics leave a bad taste in Coca-Cola’s mouth. “Don’t settle for them,” said Laura Houghton, the brand’s director of digital shopper marketing, speaking at the Modern Media Summit event during Advertising Week. “If they don’t help you answer whatever the objective is you were trying to solve with your campaign, then those metrics don’t matter to you,” she said. On the panel, Houghton encouraged advertisers to stand up for themselves and push their media partners for more relevant metrics. At the top of that list is attention. You can “game” metrics like clicks all day long, but “you can’t game whether [content] meant something to someone,” Houghton said. If the content didn’t resonate, the click is irrelevant. “It’s about the content based on your audience,” said Joshua Palau, VP of digital and omnichannel at Bayer US. “And if you’re not thinking about the platform you’re on and creating around that, it’s a problem.”

Measurement Spat

The Nielsen-comScore war rages on. The former is suing the latter for violating its use of Nielsen’s People Meter data. Variety reports comScore was authorized by an FTC ruling to use the data in a cross-platform measurement service, but has since changed the positioning of that service to be more TV-centric. Nielsen said in a statement, “Given that comScore plans to launch Extended TV in the next few months, with the intention of having the product available at the end of 2017, it is possible that Nielsen will lose other clients, particularly given that Nielsen has several large client contracts up for renewal.” More.

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