15 August, 2007: A cross industry committee which includes IAB Australia, AANA and MFA, representing website operators, advertisers and agencies, has issued an Industry Blueprint seeking expressions of interest from Australian and international research or technology companies to develop and run a self funded enhanced or new audience measurement methodology for the Australian online advertising industry.
The deadline for responses is 23rd September 2007, with the committee scheduled to review any responses between 24th September and 19th October 2007. All information provided to the committee will remain the intellectual property of the applicant and commercial and methodological information will remain confidential.
According to Dr Stuart Pike, Chair of the Committee, the Blueprint has drawn from the World Federation of Advertisers own Blueprint, and is primarily focused on finding an efficient and meaningful measure of people, as opposed to purely browser based measurement.
“The industry acknowledges that there will always be a variety of different numbers from a range of sources available to online website operators but the primary purpose of any new measurement methodology is to have a consistent way to review and report numbers for selling and planning online media.
“As the WFA has noted, we need to guide the transition of audience measurement in the industry to accommodate the increasingly complex media consumption behaviour of consumers. It’s time for measurement systems to leave their single media silo approaches and accommodate multi-media measurement,” said Dr Pike
The full Industry Blueprint, which outlines the goals of the measurement requirements and notes the necessary features identified is available to any research agencies or technology companies whether or not they are currently in this industry and/or market.
Any company that responds to the Blueprint will need to be capable of developing a similar methodology and technical solution for other digital platforms, including mobile and interactive TV at a later date.
Measurement methodology responses proposed need to measure and profile Australian internet traffic visiting any domestic or overseas sites and applications. The core measurements must be founded on people based measurements rather than browser / server side based measurements. Although planning and selling are the primary goals, any methodology that can efficiently and accurately link this data with campaign management and analysis will be reviewed favourably.
A degree of flexibility and adaptability is also crucial. With technology changing in this industry at such a rapid rate any measurement system needs to be flexible enough to change with it. The measurement systems should not be locked in to the PC environment, but rather measuring traffic over any IP enabled device.
The following factors must be addressed in responses:
– The ability to measure or project actual people is fundamental to the success of any new measurement methodology.
– The methodology needs to cover the whole market regardless of the different site centric measurement tools or tags used by individual website operators.
– Internet applications must include, but not be limited to instant messaging and audio & video streaming
– For domestic sites the priority is to focus on domestic traffic. Any overseas traffic to Australian sites must be able to be excluded from the data.
– The methodology must at least measure Internet activity at home and work.
– Agreed minimum essential metrics for the total market, categories and sites include: page impressions; visits; people; reach (of all people & internet population); time – overall time, time per site, time per session & time per page and frequency
– Respondents should aim to at least meet the age, occupation, household income and household lifecycle breaks set by the Media Federation of Australia
– Metrics and profiling information needs to be as consistent with other forms of media as possible.
/ENDS
For more editorial information please contact:
Pru Quinlan
Einsteinz Communications
T: (02) 8905 0995
E: pru@einsteinz.com.au
