Measurement

“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 […]

AskMen is firmly in the pro-platform camp among publishers. The men’s website, born during the dot-com boom, now looks to platforms, not SEO, as a way to gain audience and increase recognition. The king of those platforms is Facebook, where video posts earn the publisher millions of views. AskMen, which is owned by Ziff Davis, […]

Digital marketing firm Impact Radius scooped up ClearSaleing, the attribution component of eBay Enterprise, which was spun off from eBay in November. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Impact Radius CEO Per Pettersen told AdExchanger that he targeted ClearSaleing because “[t]hey have some very innovative technological approaches to cross-device and consumer journey tracking.” Pettersen […]

When it comes to mobile ad fraud, everything old is new again. “All the bad stuff we saw happen in web 1.0 in terms of trying to trick users is coming back with mobile,” said Alex Calic, CRO of The Media Trust, a company focused on ad verification and malware detection. That’s certainly the case […]

Six out of 10 marketers would reallocate their media spend if digital media owners failed to supply sufficient third-party measurement, according to new findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). In an ANA survey of 154 members conducted this summer, 90% of marketer respondents also said they are “not fully confident” that their working […]

The prospect of a viewable CPM (vCPM) standard for digital media buying had publishers running scared a year ago. Now, many are embracing the pricing model, but transacting this way is not without its hurdles. Publishers not only need to defend the value of their inventory to buyers when 20 to 50% of the ads […]

ComScore is keeping busy. The online measurement firm announced Thursday that it’ll be entering into a strategic global partnership with Spotify, selling its enterprise digital analytics business to Adobe and launching a new “total home” opt-in panel to measure connected devices in the household, including show-level viewing across Netflix, Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. ComScore’s […]

Want to track across devices? Then you’re going to have to enter the walled gardens of Google and Facebook. But the open ecosystem is working hard – and working together – to catch up. It’s in this spirit that MarketShare launched Monday a “Consortium for Cross-Device Measurement,” which for now includes Drawbridge, Crosswise, Tapad and […]

Analytics on Sina Weibo used to be fairly rudimentary – number of friends, number of followers, basic engagement metrics and the like. “The previous version wasn’t that good,” admitted Bryan Cheng, VP of commercial products and platforms at Weibo, commonly described as a sort of Twitter/Facebook mashup. “The point is to provide more actionable data.” […]

When the head bean-counter at Brand X walks into the CMO’s office and wants proof that TV spending works, the CMO needs a better answer than “My gut tells me it does.” “Ask anyone in charge of a TV budget, and they’ll tell you that they intuitively know it works,” said David Staas, president of […]

The ad tech community has taken its strategies to legacy marketing channels before – billboards, radio, point-of-sale systems and even linear TV. Now add direct mail to the list. PebblePost launched publicly and revealed a $3 million seed round on Tuesday. CEO Lewis Gersh hopes to bring real-time analytics to direct mail campaigns for the […]

The merger of comScore and Rentrak, announced Tuesday, creates a powerful new player providing unified digital and offline measurement. The deal poses a real challenge to Nielsen, which nevertheless is not about to be overthrown as the reining champ of marketing and media measurement. Pending regulatory approval, comScore will begin to combine its digital audience measurement […]

Nielsen’s having a tough week. On Tuesday, comScore and Rentrak, two of Nielsen’s top competitors, announced their intention to merge into a single measurement monolith. And on Thursday, business channel CNBC, a division of NBCUniversal, will officially kick Nielsen to the curb, turning instead to research firm Cogent Reports for its audience measurement. Comcast-owned NBCUniversal […]

There’s apparently power in numbers in the fight against ratings fixture Nielsen. Measurement companies comScore and Rentrak have reached a definitive agreement to merge, the two companies announced Tuesday. (press release) In the stock-for-stock merger, Rentrak is to merge into a wholly owned subsidiary of comScore. ComScore CEO Serge Matta will take the reins as CEO […]

Just about every brand with a TV budget wants the answer to a simple question: How many people took action after seeing my ad on TV? But it’s not the type of question that can be answered by a gross rating point (GRP). To better understand the impact of its TV advertising, Ford and its […]

Beyond knowing whether an ad was viewed and for how long, marketers want to verify viewability percentages against key audience segments, which is the basis of a new alliance between Nielsen and Integral Ad Science (IAS). Although the two companies have partnered since 2012, they have now expanded the scope of their relationship to offer […]

Pirated content and ad fraud are like a nefarious version of peanut butter and jelly – but there’s not lot of awareness in the industry about their connection. “The people who create pirate sites are the same ones who perpetrate clickbot fraud – they’re the ones who spread malware and create the armies of bots that generate […]

In the world of independent, third-party measurement, Symphony Advanced Media (SAM) is David and Nielsen is Goliath. But the San Francisco-based media measurement and research firm is looking to take on incumbents like Nielsen and comScore with Tuesday’s launch of cross-screen measurement tool VideoPulse. A+E, Viacom, NBC and Warner Brothers’ Media Research and Insights are […]

Flashtalking is on a quest to become what company CEO John Nardone calls a “single point of truth.” It’s why the NYC-based ad server decided to buy Device[9], a small cross-device recognition company located in Hamburg, Germany. The acquisition, announced Tuesday, was a mostly stock deal. Nardone declined to share the sale price. At its […]

Remember when Facebook said it wouldn’t allow independent viewability verification on its properties? And remember when WPP’s GroupM agencies Unilever, Kellogg and others were extremely displeased with that proposition and said they would curtail spending on platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, where third-party viewability tags weren’t welcome? Well, Facebook announced Thursday that it’s planning to […]

Creatives deserve to be part of the conversation around programmatic media. The fact is, they’re not. “There are no true creatives in this room – and that’s a major silo,” said Steven Wolfe Pereira, VP of brand strategy and marketing solutions at Oracle Data Cloud, at the comScore Industry Summit on Tuesday. “Creative people are not […]

Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi will officially release a tool called Quality Index (QI) at the end of this month, designed to streamline inventory sources, manage multiple KPIs and cross-check viewability. QI has been in Beta since late 2014, and will be part of an internal UI called the VivaKi Operating System (VOS) Platform that VivaKi is building […]

Instagram has rounded up a posse of Facebook Marketing Partners since the closed beta launch of its ads API in early August. Mobile analytics company Appsflyer is the most recent addition to a list that includes AdRoll, Adaptly, Ampush, Brand Networks, 4C, Kenshoo, Laundry Service, Publicis-owned agency Mediavest, Nanigans, Olapic, Resolution Media, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, […]

Does seeing an ad lead to visiting a store? Location data company PlaceIQ wants to answer that ever-thorny question with the launch of Enterprise PVR, a metric designed to measure foot traffic at specific locations by tracking on-device consumer behavior in the physical world. PVR, which stands for “place visit rate,” is a metric PlaceIQ […]

A troupe of traditional broadcasters has a message for media buyers: Your perception of audio streaming audiences is skewed, according to a study by Advertiser Perceptions released Tuesday. The study, commissioned by terrestrial broadcasters (including Cumulus, Westwood One, iHeartMedia, CBS Radio, Cox Media Group, Hubbard Radio, Radio Advertising Bureau and Radio One) found media buyers […]

The executives in this story will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. It’s still unclear how effective mobile advertising can be, despite its explosive growth. For instance, mobile passed desktop in terms of user content consumption in early 2014, but still […]

Some members of the advertising and marketing community are seeing a renewed interest in one of the oldest, least-loved marketing channels: the phone call. Customer call centers and direct phone sales are parts of a consumer funnel that many brands still try to avoid, according to Peter Christothoulou, CEO of Marchex, which provides software for […]

ComScore’s partnership with Google, which integrates the former’s Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) measurement into the latter’s DoubleClick products, has come out of beta. The partnership was first revealed in February 2014. During a Q2 earnings call Tuesday, comScore CEO Serge Matta noted that “vCE is the first independent measurement system to be directly integrated into Google […]