Magid Abraham – CEO, comScore
Steve Hasker – President, Media Product Leadership & Advertiser Solutions, The Nielsen Company
Jeff Lavick – President, Global Advertising & Strategy, AOL
Eran Shir – Founder & CTO, Dapper (now at Yahoo)
Moderator: Dave Morgan – Founder & CEO, Simulmedia
Magid: Getting dollars from TV will be the challenge. We need to get away from click rates – they are an antiquated metric.
Eran: Consumers expect ads to become a valuable part of their web experiences. Advertisers trained consumers to regard it as the least valuable experience. But we are starting to move back.
Jeff: We view data as important, but as directional. Data can’t help us understand the creative value. What consumers find beautiful and engaging.
Steve: Any CMO will tell you they want to make better decisions, and they just want the data to do that. Most feel they are swimming in data, but need it to be actionable. We need more than just cool analytics.
Dave: Do you think we are going to see the web move more like TV with just 1 or 2 currancies, or will we have lots of secondary currencies? (ie: CPA, CPO, etc)
Steve: Most people said they didn’t want to get tied to metrics that looked like TV. And what’s changing is that we are moving into the direction of web looking like TV on the metrics
Jeff: Ad units that we have today were created by engineers not marketers – so AOL is looking to reinvent the ad unit space and make it more interactive and engaging.
Dave: What do you expect your companies to be?
Steve: They think about being the highest producer of high quality information. Looking to be the online version of Conde Nast offline – beautiful experiences of information and content.
Magid: The notion of currencies on the web have been the ad server, not ComScore and Neilsen. 50% of impressions served are not actually being seen by the user. They want to be the Google of Analytics – the way Google organizes the worlds knowledge. They want to help deliver the right analytics to help people deliver more value, creating more monitization. The average Facebook user on mobile is a heavier user then they are on TV.
Eran: (Has been with Yahoo for 3 weeks) Advertising is just content. You have published content and advertising content – from the consumers POV it’s the same thing. If you open up a web page and the ads are not the best part of the page then the marketer has failed at their job.
Steve: If you take a great advertiser to a publisher – they would be happy to take the great advertiser for half the price.
Eran: Data and technology are there. The issue issue is that the ad industry has just not adapted. He wants to do what Google has done for Search and wants to do it for the Web.
Steve: They want to be a vastly improved Nielsen combined with a McKinsey. Not being a consulting firm, but being more insightful and leaning forward. They want to be better at integrating 3rd party data. Need to be better at client service, and the industry needs to get ahead of online mobile.
Jeff: There are more variables than what we current measure. Can we better understand the correlation between web and TV. The two mediums do work together – it would be great if we had a measurement that weaved through all of it.
Eran: The most critical measurement point is the attribution funnel – offline to online and more. Data is everything, creativity is important, but ideally it gets scaled by data. Ideally the consumer will see the ad as a valuable form of content. The reason banners are in a box today – is because publishers don’t want to be associated with that “non valuable item” on the page. The banner needs to provide experience to the user?
Magid: One of the metric that is lacking is evaluating the creative. TV does that very well, you test it, before you role. 50% of effectiveness of an ad is the creative itself and 15% is the medium – yet when it doesn’t work its the media that gets blamed. The metric that will matter in a cross media world will NOT be GRPs. A next generation media mix model, evaluating effectiveness, and focusing on the consumer and the best place to reach them.
Steve: We need to start with a metric that is largely on TV. Next year they will launch a GRP model for online. Hoping that this will set a level playing field.
Steve: We would like to do more open source data crunching, but not there yet.
Audience Question: Too much data sometimes distorts and confuses investment making.
Magid: Yes – you can get analysis paralysis. Part of their job is to create tools that get you the important numbers you need.
Esther: What is Nielsen doing to protect privacy (based on WSJ article) and respect for contracts and Terms of Service.
Shenanize 