Q&A: IAB's Rothenberg

NEW YORK In his first major initiative since taking over as CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau five months ago, Randall Rothenberg has publicly called out Internet measurement firms ComScore and Nielsen//NetRatings for using what he terms "ancient" methods to measure how many people visit Web sites.He says the discrepancies cast a cloud over the measurability of the Web and put its expansion at risk.Q: Web publishers have complained for years that metrics services aren't accurate. Why is this an important issue now?A: Within the past 18 to 24 months, certainly no longer than 24 months, every Fortune 1000 company in the United States has stood up, looked outside their offices and said, "Oh my God, it happened." Everything changed. We reached a real inflection point. Now interactive marketing is the center of all marketing. This is now no longer an internal argument and debate among digital natives. This is now at the heart of the present and future of all marketing. We need to raise it to a level of seriousness and urgency to make sure that media companies, advertising agencies and third-party intermediaries are really serving the needs of marketers.What's the crux of the problem?The crux is significant discrepancies between what media companies are able to measure and what the major third-party audience measurement companies are able to measure. The discrepancies are of such a magnitude that they can't be readily explained. The first step should be to get a process and technology audit of the main audience measurement companies. We haven't been able to get them to set a timetable for auditing.Do you think they've dodged this issue?I don't know. I can only surmise that up until relatively recently the significance seemed secondary. But the fact of the matter is that the world has grown up around us. The interactive media companies, interactive advertising agencies, interactive units, marketers and third parties that work with us are now really at the center of marketing decision making and at the center of marketing.What's the risk of not addressing this?There are several. The biggest is clearly to delay the evolution of marketing towards true accountability for spending and decision making. What marketers want is true accountability, the ability to link spending decisions and strategic decisions to results. This puts obstacles on the path to accomplishing that. It ultimately...takes a medium that is the most potentially accountable ever invented and puts it at a level of equivalency with vague mass media.So, why an open letter?We had an IAB board meeting 12 days ago and we had a significant discussion of strategy. I raised the issue of [what our stance] should be. Of the 26 board members present, 26 raised their hands and said we should be aggressive. I started probing them why and their response was, "Randy, you are the latest in a long line of messengers. We have been asking politically and privately for years and we have received unsatisfactory responses." The time has come, given the evolution of the industry and given the seriousness with which marketers are taking this, to raise the level of conversation and involve others so that we can find a way to get together and resolve this fixing issue.The ratings companies responded that they're in the process of getting audited. What's the problem then?Nielsen//NetRatings said in its response that it fully intends to seek full MRC [Media Ratings Council] accreditation. We're obviously thrilled by that response. [But] we still don't have a timetable. We have heard these promises in the past—in some cases, they go back as far as 1999. We need a timetable to have the audits done. In the case of ComScore, I spoke with [ComScore CEO Magid] Abraham yesterday. He indicated he is willing to seek an audit and participate in a cross-industry working group. We're happy about that, but, again, what we really need is a timetable. We've had these promises of auditing going back several years. So far we haven't seen the audits. Without the audits, we're not on the same footing and the same level of transparency as other media. Is it foot-dragging by the measurement services?All I could say is that we have invented the most potentially accountable medium ever invented. We have significant discrepancies in audience measurement. The third-party measurement companies have persisted in using processes and technologies that are ancient.You mean panels?It is imperative upon all of us to try to close the gap between sample and census. The first step in doing that is a transparent audit by the Media Ratings Council. Congress helped establish that as a basis for transparency for media measurement and for marketing decision making more than 40 years ago. There's no reason that these major companies that have major impact on marketing shouldn't do what every other medium has been able to do with its measurement companies. This is not a debate about one specific measurement technology versus another specific measurement technology. What it's really about is transparency. This is about continuing to improve the technologies and processes we use to come closer and closer to that great promise of true accountability.What's the next step?We have gotten promises before. I think the public nature of these promises is a step in the right direction from both Comscore and Nielsen//NetRatings. What we would love to happen now are two things. We'd like each of the companies to publicly set a timetable to be audited by the MRC. [And] we'd love to be able to bring together a cross-industry working group on audience measurement so that we can publicly and transparently put in place procedures that allow us to maintain good, accurate accountability processes even as technology continues to evolve. We want to do that with the agency community and we want to do that with marketers as well.

Brand Marketing

Q&A: IAB's Rothenberg

Brian Morrissey

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Brian Morrissey