Measurement

CNN is signing on with comScore’s syndicated measurement service Xmedia, a competitive offering to Nielsen’s Total Audience measurement. Xmedia is designed to help media companies understand their cross-platform audiences by tracking unduplicated reach across TV, digital, set-top box and mobile properties. CNN now claims to have a total unduplicated audience of 174 million across TV, […]

Publisher network and ad tech firm Sovrn bought UK-based viewability company OnScroll Wednesday for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. Sovrn plans to deploy the technology across the 80,000 publishers in its network, according to CEO Walter Knapp. OnScroll creates highly viewable ad units for publishers by analyzing user behavior patterns. So if a […]

Facebook invited three new third-party ad verification partners into its inner sanctum on Tuesday – further evidence that what the buy side demands, the buy side gets. Integral Ad Science, comScore and Nielsen will now be able to verify viewability and attention metrics for display and video ads on Facebook, including mobile web and in-app. […]

If there’s one thing that ticks off Jim Kiszka, Kellogg’s senior manager of digital media, it’s paying extra for viewable impressions. “I absolutely resent the fact I have to pay more for viewability,” Kiszka said Wednesday at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO show in San Francisco. “I wish I could have a refund for the last 10 years […]

Nielsen predominantly partnered with big marketing clouds à la Adobe to date – until now. The measurement giant on Tuesday rolled out the Nielsen Marketing Cloud, which is is the company’s first major attempt to unify various homegrown and acquired assets into a single platform for media owners and advertisers. A number of food and […]

Aaron Fetters will discuss advancements (and present-day shortcomings) in data, ad delivery and effectiveness on April 14 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. Advertisers question ad quality and the ability to activate “open” data across platforms in the programmatic space, but what’s being done about it? First, marketers need to rethink the way they’ve traditionally tallied […]

There’s an opportunity around location that extends beyond targeting consumers with ads for mayonnaise or corn flakes when they’re walking down an aisle in a grocery store. “The location data opportunity is still unfolding,” said Tracey Scheppach, EVP of precision video at Publicis Groupe’s Starcom MediaVest. “As agencies start to get smart about things like […]

Scale is becoming less of a differentiator among digital publishers – meaning they’ll soon have to focus on metrics like engagement. According to comScore’s “Cross-Platform Future in Focus” report, released Wednesday, 20% more digital media properties, including publishers and ecommerce sites, have topped 20 million uniques in the past year. That’s a total of 206 […]

Shaina Boone will discuss viewability, fraud and supply chain issues on April 14 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. Talking about fraud and viewability is one thing – but “actually managing it is an entire program,” said Shaina Boone, managing director of marketing sciences at OMD USA, where she helms the analytics practice. Managing advertiser expectations is […]

Beyond the headlines, the drama and all the talk, there’s the daily reality of actually putting viewability into practice. “The questions around how to transact around viewability have been such a big issue for both publishers and advertisers that I think there has been a session in just about every major conference over the past […]

ComScore’s got a memo for Nielsen: It’s moving into cross-platform video and audience measurement – big time. Just days after comScore inked a multiyear measurement deal with Viacom, the first since its merger with Rentrak, it struck a strategic partnership with Adobe, the two companies revealed on Tuesday at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas. […]

Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) and Time Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new measurement product for attributing offline sales to print magazine advertising. “It’s the culmination of years of work and of a lot of pieces coming together,” said Leslie Wood, NCS chief research officer. And the product relies on a dense web of partners and […]

Google on Tuesday launched an analytics service, Google Analytics (GA) 360 Suite, designed specifically for enterprise marketers. The suite consists of six products: the former GA Premium as the centerpiece; Adometry, rebranded as Attribution 360; the data management platform (DMP) Audience Center 360; Optimize 360, a website optimization and personalization product; Data Studio 360, an […]

OwnerIQ’s unique second-party data-sharing model, where it acts as media buyer and data broker between retailers and manufacturing brands, is showing signs of breaking through the initial skepticism which accompanied second-party marketing. The Boston-based company’s $40 million revenue from 2006 to late 2014 pales compared to its $60 million spike in 2015. Second-party data involves […]

Call it the holistic grail: the ability to connect advertising, ecommerce activity and in-store buying with a single measurement. No one’s filled that gap yet, but a bunch of companies are taking incremental steps. Earlier this month the location analytics shop Placed added a product for attributing in-store lift to its suite. Then last week […]

Canadian video ad platform SourceKnowledge has closed $1.5 million in mezzanine financing from BDC Capital that it will use for product development and building out its West Coast operations. The Montreal-based company, which was founded in 2009, is profitable and was largely bootstrapped until now, so it wished to remain modest by taking a mezzanine […]

In the security community, engineers have their own name for the Internet of Things (IoT). They call it the “Internet of Insecure Things.” “In the future, even light bulbs will be controlled by Wi-Fi,” said Kevin Curran, a senior member of the IEEE and a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Ulster […]

Average CPMs on the AppNexus platform rose sharply during the second half of 2015, from below 20 cents last summer to $1.60 by early fall, as invalid traffic was rejected under the company’s anti-fraud efforts. Meanwhile, volume fell off a cliff, with impression transactions plummeting more than 90% from December to September. The company released the data Wednesday […]

ComScore has struck a measurement deal with Twitter to enable a tagless integration to its digital audience delivery and analytics system, validated Campaign Essentials (vCE). The integration will take effect in Q2 and will give advertisers access to digital GRPs and reach and frequency metrics. These new reporting features will be available directly within Twitter’s […]

Nielsen is increasing its ownership stake in Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) – its joint venture with shopper marketing company Catalina – from 50% to a majority 63.5%. Nielsen Catalina connects TV viewing and digital ad exposure to in-store buying, which Nielsen claims perfectly aligned with its business strategy. “Helping clients find the right audiences and […]

Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]

Google is upping its defenses against ad fraud to take on three malware families. The offenders include Bedep, plus two previously unknown entities internally code-named Beetal and Changthangi, which are named for goat species. Read the blog post. Google has developed a filter – now available for advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) and Google Display […]

Just because an ad is “in-view,” that doesn’t mean it’s effective. On the contrary, time spent is often a better indicator of ad effectiveness than percentage of pixels in-view on a page. That’s according to a new viewability study from Interpublic Group (IPG) and measurement firm Integral Ad Science. The report, “Putting Science Behind The […]

ComScore and Rentrak have completed their merger, cinching a deal aimed at establishing new multiscreen currencies to rival TV ratings incumbent Nielsen. The all-stock deal was originally valued at $732 million based on market prices at the time the deal was announced in September. The merger, which gained shareholder approvals late Friday, represented $767.7 million in final deal value, […]

Why a user deletes an app is just as important as why that person decided to download in the first place. “Uninstalls are a huge issue and we’ve been trying to get an understanding of what’s really happening there,” said Sudarshan Gangrade, VP of marketing, analytics and partnerships at Ola Cabs, India’s answer to Uber. […]

Despite ongoing efforts by the Media Rating Council to close the reconciliation gap between vendors, discrepancies continue to haunt viewable impression counts. And there are some who say the MRC is needlessly adding complexity to the process with its reporting requirements. “There’s a lot of slicing and dicing of the data going on,” said David […]

The ad server Flashtalking added attribution analytics to its platform Tuesday with the acquisition of Encore Media Metrics. The terms of the deal and valuation were not disclosed. “We think there’s a real opportunity in the market by bringing together in a bundle all the options for online advertising programs,” said Flashtalking CEO John Nardone. […]

“The world may have a polling problem,” declared Nate Silver, the former New York Times statistical wunderkind who’s since launched FiveThirtyEight under the ESPN banner, in an article last year. Silver made this claim following the failure of UK polls to predict results of the country’s general election last May. In the US, he noted […]

Malvertising – or malicious online ads that spread code to commit ad fraud or access a user’s data – might not induce the same industry-wide concern of viewability and fraud, but it’s still an issue. An IAB report from November estimated the cost of malvertising attacks to be more than $200 million – And that’s […]

Do Nielsen and alcoholic beverages mix? The two may sound like unlikely companions, but Nielsen has partnered with the creator of a mobile app called OpenBar to roll out a new measurement platform for alcoholic beverage marketing. The platform, Nielsen Bar Moments, will launch in the first quarter of 2016. BARTRENDr, the data analytics company […]