InteracTiVoty - Last Gasp of Relevance for Age/Gender Demos - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBlogger

Everyone talks about the precise measurement that comes with Internet advertising It has become the perfect contrast for all the problems with measuring television But what are they really talking about and why can39t we have it with TV Certainly they39re not talking about Internet display advertising You have two competing panelbased currencies whose audience estimates are wildly different server logs from clients that produce another very different estimate and finally direct measurement providers with yet another very different estimate How many people saw that banner ad Pick a number any numberThe case for superior Internet measurability started when banner ads were tracked and often boughtsold based on clickthroughs Clickthroughs are quotperfectlyquot measurable But it didn39t take long to figure out Internet display advertising is really about impressions not clicks so various competing services and methodologies were developed to estimate the delivery of impressions About that same time however a new form of Internet advertising was developing a little thing called quotsearchquot Search is now held up as the shining example of the world39s most perfectly measurable advertising medium you know exactly how many prospects Search delivers to your site you know exactly what you paid for them and can adjust that in near real time you know exactly what they did and bought when they came to your site or returned in the future amp8211 all the elements for a perfectly calculable ROIAmazingly in all the discussions about the perfect measurability of Search I have never once heard anybody point out what39s obviously MISSING agesex demographics Nobody asks Google or Yahoo or Bing quotwhat demo39s does your portal deliverquot Can you imagine bidding for keywords based on agesex quotI39ll pay 225 per click for M1834 but only 150 per click for M50quot Of course not It doesn39t matter What matters is the value of attracting an interested prospect to come to your site and measuring exactly how many of these prospects you generate and how many sales are eventually createdWhy is almost every other media except Internet so singularly focused on agesex demo39s I believe it can largely be explained by the evolution of the measurement techniques themselves In the early days of television and radio and print the only way to attempt to determine the audience for a commercial message was to ask a group of people to selfreport what they watchedlistened toread Due to shear economic and logistical forces this group of people was a relatively small sample of the entire population Over time some of the selfreporting was replaced with electronic measurement but the size and nature of the sample populations remained more or less the same A rich field of statistical science burgeoned on topics such as selection bias cooperation bias weighting smoothing etc While very smart statisticians and researchers worked hard to create the best projections they could the fact remains that the projections were and are projections and subject to significant variation based on myriad methodological decisionsYou had a situation where there was great believed certainty in the composition of the specific panel itself whereas the projections of total audience were less certain Human nature being what it is no surprise the interpretation and use of the data gravitated toward the most known element We believed with much confidence that 1834 year old men behaved in a certain way because a group of a couple thousand recruited 1834 men reportedly behaved that way if they correctly cooperated with the research demands Less certain was how many 1834 year old men or total individuals or total households across the country consumed a piece of commercial content let alone how many took action with the brandWe are witnessing a time when digital technology in the form of settop boxes may finally be ready to transform the TV measurement paradigm into the Search paradigm Settop boxes can free us from the constraints of a panel Like Internet Search smartly used collections of settop box data can provide high certainty on the precise quantity of an advertising message consumed Innovative providers are taking this a step further and marrying precise advertising consumption with other behaviors such as crossmedia behavior example TiVoQuantcast or product purchase example TRAYet there are still those whose first response to settop box data is quotBut you don39t know the demographicsquot Right And neither does Search If agesex demographics are really that important they can be projected Given the choice between 1 certainty of demographics but projected total audience versus 2 certainty of total audience and connections to other behavior but projected demographics which is more appealing The success of Search tells us the answerTodd Juenger is VP and General Manager Audience Research and Measurement for TiVo IncRead all Toddamp8217s MediaBizBlogger commentaries at 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InteracTiVoty - Last Gasp of Relevance for Age/Gender Demos - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBlogger

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