Measurement

Nielsen intends to acquire Gracenote, a Tribune-owned company specializing in audio and video content recognition technology, for $560 million, the company confirmed on Tuesday. Gracenote will operate under Nielsen’s “Watch” business – the side of the house that measures audiences – and the acquisition is expected to close Q1 2017. If it goes through, Nielsen will […]

Advertisers get a little antsy when they see headlines like “More Facebook Measurement Problems!” – but the sky didn’t fall when Facebook began what’s turned into an ongoing measurement mea culpa. “I don’t have a single client that doubts the social and economic performance and importance of Facebook and all of their platforms,” said Rob Norman, […]

Another independent attribution solution is off the market. SAP said Wednesday that it had purchased Abakus, a move that puts it further into the paid media arena. Terms were not disclosed. Abakus’ attribution system is unique since it applies game theory to forecast scenarios that influence media buying and optimization. It also uses split-funnel attribution […]

FuturePlay Games relies primarily on advertising to monetize. But it had a devil of a time attributing ad revenue to specific campaigns. “We knew that an ad had been watched on a device, but we didn’t know how much money we got back from it,” said Camilo Fitzgerald, a games analyst at the Helsinki-based game […]

While the online advertising trade groups have created anti-fraud programs and exchanges have instituted inventory standards, fraud is still on the rise. AdExchanger reached out to some of the people in the trenches about where the digital ad tech and media ecosystem stands now and how progress can be made. Click below for their responses. […]

Despite skyrocketing mobile traffic and climbing mobile conversion rates, British airline Monarch was struggling to determine precisely what was or wasn’t working for mobile media buys. “We persistently got all the data in and still faced the question: What about mobile?” said Robert Foulkes, senior marketing manager for the low-cost airline. Monarch was among the […]

Beacons started out as a solution in search of a problem. And now some beacon providers are companies in search of a home. On Monday, mobile ad platform The Mobile Majority acquired geolocation beacon company Gimbal, a spinoff of Qualcomm. In June, location data company Verve Mobile bought beacon provider Roximity almost exactly one year […]

Attribution isn’t perfect. Far from it. But perfection isn’t what the industry should be aiming for. “If you wait for the end state, you won’t have a business for 10 years and by that time the world will have moved on,” said Pravin Chandiramani, Simulmedia’s SVP of data strategy, speaking at a measurement and attribution […]

Ad networks catch a lot of flak as conduits of bad traffic from shady publishers. “It is true that some bad players intentionally sell fraudulent traffic and that other players are just turning a blind eye,” said Asaf Greiner, CEO and founder of fraud detection company Protected Media. “But there are also others working very […]

When Atlas served ads, the industry shrugged. On Friday, Facebook made the inevitable official by retiring the ad-serving component of Atlas, thereby making it primarily a people-based measurement pixel. The ad-serving capability will be phased out over the next couple of months so as not to be disruptive to users. Facebook’s ad stack looks quite […]

  Facebook admitted additional measurement errors Wednesday, along with policy and organizational changes meant to narrow the trust gap between marketers and the mobile world’s leading ad platform. The news comes less than two months after Facebook disclosed that it had been overstating video engagement results, prompting backlash from agencies and concern from other digital media […]

Kantar Media, long considered a rival to Nielsen’s mainstay TV measurement business internationally, is restructuring the way it goes to market. Although Kantar Media previously operated as one of 12 distinct brands within the Kantar Group, sometimes there was a lack of visibility between different brands. “We’ve had a very strange organizational structure,” admits Andy Brown, chairman and […]

Statisticians know that correlation does not imply causation – so, applying that same logic to advertising, a consumer who saw an ad and converted could have already been predisposed to purchase. One big issue with attribution, as it exists today, is that many marketers still rely on last-touch. Video also poses unique challenges, since brands […]

Snaplytics, a third-party Snapchat measurement vendor, came out of beta Wednesday after spending more than a year developing the hardware and software needed to pull marketing insights from Snapchat accounts. “It’s not similar to fairly straightforward API analytics like with Twitter and Facebook,” Snaplytics co-founder and CEO Thomas Cilius told AdExchanger. “You need some custom […]

Roku has added comScore’s validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) to its list of video measurement partners. Although Roku had embedded Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings directly into its operating system in 2015, its customers wanted to use the vCE currency for measuring OTT, said Scott Rosenberg, VP of advertising and audience development for Roku. “We’re not trying […]

Turner will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O Conference in New York on Oct. 27. Turner took a bold position when it promised that by 2020 more than 50% of its inventory would be transacted against audience guarantees. Since then, CNN, TNT and TruTV’s parent broadcaster has grown its data management and marketing services business, to […]

Like the measurement industry it tracks, Forrester’s Cross-Channel Attribution Wave has evolved. Now dubbed the Marketing Measurement and Optimization Solutions Wave, Forrester noted a migration toward more unified measurement in its latest edition, released Tuesday. “Several tried-and-true approaches to measuring marketing effectiveness served their purpose for a long period of time,” said Tina Moffett, a […]

Media agency Horizon Media worked with Placed, a location analytics and attribution firm, on both companies’ first attempt to measure the impact of digital advertising on movie ticket sales. Horizon Media is the longstanding media buyer for the production studio STX Entertainment. It has worked with Placed for other advertisers, “and we started having conversations […]

Welcome to episode no. 2 of AdExchanger Talks, a new podcast on data-driven marketing. Let us know if you like it, and please subscribe via your preferred channel. Use the player below to listen now.   What are the trends in video consumption across traditional TV and digital channels? Ask Lynda Clarizio, Nielsen’s President of US […]

There’s nothing sexier than measurement. Well, that’s not true. But it was certainly a hot topic during Advertising Week. Google made cross-device announcements, Nielsen waxed poetic about the future of measurement, Facebook got reprimanded by the industry for mistakenly exaggerating its average view times for video and Tapad rolled out a new time-based metric. The […]

Google will expand its free marketing measurement software by adding an A/B testing product (Google Optimize), a data reporting and dashboard-creation tool (Google Data Studio) and new machine learning capabilities for Google Analytics. These products will be available in an open beta starting next month. “The ultimate goal is to provide a kind of analyst […]

Consumers are subscribing to more streaming video-on-demand services these days, but “cord cutting” may not be as rampant as some would lead you to believe. Because cable networks measure audience viewership differently than certain Nielsen metrics, the contrast tends to create an apples-to-oranges scenario when tracking overall viewership. That’s why TV networks defend the claim […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Damian Garbaccio, executive vice president at Nielsen Marketing Cloud. We all know that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies spend a lot on advertising. In the US alone, CPG and consumer […]

Digital ad experts are rising in the political campaign world, but digital’s unique measurement capabilities aren’t coming with them. A big part of the problem is that the nature of voting defies measurement. “On the political side, there’s only one interaction a person takes [i.e., his or her vote], and you don’t know for months […]

This is the first installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Nazanin Jazayeri is a translator. As director of advanced analytics at Mindshare, she’s part of a team that bridges product developers, media planners and buyers by interpreting the massive streams of data that […]

Upscale Las Vegas hotel Aria Resort & Casino wanted to draw a clearer correlation between viewability and video completions, two metrics sometimes at odds for advertisers. And as mobile video became more substantive in its media mix, it also needed to crack the creative demands of smaller screen sizes. When Aria set out two years […]

Although the Rio Olympics broke its own record for reserved ad dollars set during the London Games in 2012, broadcast is losing its iron grip on live sports media. Ratings for NBC across a portfolio of Comcast-owned properties (like MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Golf Channel, Telemundo and the NBC smart-TV app channel) were down compared […]

Google’s Paul Pellman will speak at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference in Chicago on September 8. Since Google acquired attribution company Adometry two years ago, it has sought to bridge the measurement gap between mobile, offline and digital conversions. Adometry gained more interoperability with other Google media and measurement products in March, when it was assimilated into Google’s new six-product […]

ComScore replaced its CEO and rearranged its leadership team Wednesday amid an internal investigation of its accounting practices that started shortly after comScore and Rentrak completed their merger in February. Because of the ongoing investigation, which is being conducted with the help of independent counsel, comScore hasn’t reported Q1 or Q2 revenue. Co-founder Gian Fulgoni […]

WPP’s GroupM upended the industry’s mutual viewability standard back in 2014, when it promised to buy only 100% in-view ads for clients. Now it’s created an executive position to enforce that standard in all of its markets as well as to shield clients from a slew of other brand safety issues presented by digital advertising. […]