Digital Media Stumbles On Audience Measurement

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The lack of a universal payback and audience tracking metric is strangling the rollout of digital media in Australia. Industry professionals are yearning for a controlled and guided initiative to drive the development of an audience measurement system that truly ‘engages’.

We are all very familiar with the benefits of leveraging and deploying the multitude of digital media tools available freely (and commercially) on the internet for the purpose of fostering word of mouth – advertisings nuclear weapon. For example GeekSquad and SunMicrosystems use externally facing blogs, podcasts and forums to communicate with their developer/employee community and normal customers – gather these feedbacks – and plug it back into their iterative customer intelligence initiatives which drive bottom line results via better product adoption, referral sales, brand loyalty – but most importantly, engagement!

With this in mind, why is it that in Australia, internet and other digital media account for only 20 per cent of Australia’s total media consumption with this medium capturing less than 10 percent of the $12 billion advertising market?

According to Neil Shoebridge, in “Across the digital divide” BRW (Oct25-Nov28 2007), it all comes down to a “lack of robust metrics to measure audiences and return on investment”. He cites a survey aimed at the business community by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the United States which found that more than 60 percent of respondents asserted that their foremost barrier to increase investment in digital marketing is due to “insufficient metrics”, with 51 percent quoting a “lack of organizational support” and 59 percent blaming a “lack of experience in new media”.

Another Fairfax Business Research survey initiative amongst Australian executives with responsibility for online marketing activities – detailed in a flagship BRW Digital Generation edition – resonates with this data. The survey found that 37% of companies measure their return on investment from online advertising – quite a small percentage if you think about it and one that can be directly related to be a function of the 74% of respondents who found tracking the effectiveness of online advertising/marketing to be their biggest business challenge.

Additional data that compounds the ANA dataset are:

        27% believe educating staff and management as being challenges

        32% nominate increased costs in paid search advertising

        32% and 12% ranked increasing competition for premium advertising space and managing relationships across numerous publishers, agencies and services respectively as barriers

        24% stating that online /digital advertising had little or no impact on overall sales/revenue (which feeds back intrinsically to the tracking problem)

Naturally, the barriers of organizational support and lack of experience can be overcome as more companies immerse themselves into developing capabilities and research in digital media and leveraging case studies internationally for domain application. However, due to the fragmentation of the media sector and resultant splintering of consumers’ media consumption, the most difficult task facing the industry worldwide would be to develop and endorse a universal audient measurement system for online communities or targeted ‘engagement advertising’ initiatives.

Therefore, the solution to the problem will not be easy! A lot of it will lie in translating the concept of ‘engagement’ into action and building on the most prospective results! There was even a research taskforce setup by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the ANA which defined the concept of ‘engagement’ as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context”. This reveals – as concurred by David Verklin, the New York based chief executive of media agency Carat Americas and a member of the research taskforce mentioned – that “there is agreement about the fact we need to move away from a metric that is based solely on exposure…we need to know how engaged people are with media…but we’re going to have a hard time coming up with a universal standard of engagement across all media”.
So its assumed that – in order to create an industry (even world) standard system of measuring online audiences – media and research companies just might have to cluster and form collaborative and concurrent research and application networks, where the research facility develops and tests in parallel with the application companies (by leveraging their networks and engaging small pilot projects) and building on what results work best. The main players in the Australian digital media market comprise of online classified providers (such as Fairfax, Sensis, PBL, Telstra and Newscorp), online advertising networks (for example Platform Nine, Ad2One, MediaSmart, 3d Interactive, Tempest Media) and online publishers and broadcasters (like Fairfax Media, Ten Network, Google, Prime Media Group, APN News and Media, News Corporation, Fox Interactive Media and News Digital Media).
Despite their inherent cultural and business differences – there should be a collective initiative aimed at driving, what a prominent online advertising executive Harold Mitchell calls, as something which is  “less siloed and more holistic….towards convergence in the same way that media [really]is!”