Digital Media Measurement: Brands Need 'Relevant' Scale for Standards

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is working with consultants Bain & Co and MediaLink to develop 'sensible' measures. This and other news related to social media in a wide-ranging interview with IAB President Randall Rothenberg with Steve Smith of MinOnline:

"After several years as president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Randall Rothenberg took what now looks like a brief hiatus at Time Inc. as chief digital officer. Two months into the job, and after newly-installed Time Inc. chief Jack Griffin got axed, he was back at the IAB picking up where he left off. And as he outlines for us in an exclusive minonline interview, there was a lot waiting on his plate back at the industry association. On Thursday April 7, Rothenberg will be the keynote speaker at min’s Best of the Web Awards event at the Grand Hyatt in New York.

We asked him to reflect on the agenda he picks back up at the IAB and the role of major media brands online in coming years. It turns out, he already had his to-do list in hand...and numbered.

Min: What will be the key initiatives for the IAB in the coming months? As you come back to the organization, what do you see as the top priorities?

Rothenberg: IAB is focused on six key initiatives for 2011, and each of them is vital to the interactive industry broadly, and to magazine publishers specifically.

One. “Making Measurement Make Sense” is a groundbreaking collaboration among the IAB, 4A’s, and ANA to develop measurement standards that will simplify the planning, sale, optimization, and growth of brand advertising in digital media, and across platforms. With research and development support from Bain & Co. and Medialink LLC, we’re working with dozens of major marketers, agencies, and media companies develop standards that will help showcase the real value of interactive media – and all media – to brand marketers.

Two. “Building Brands Online” builds on the measurement initiative, and central to it is effort to find the new “rising stars” of interactive brand advertising. An expert panel of executives from creative agencies, media agencies, and publishers selected from among dozens of submissions six online ad formats they deemed to have the best potential to showcase brands best. These aren’t just larger formats – they deploy the full functionality of the Web, including social engagement, video, and rich media, on behalf of marketers. For the rest of the year, we’re doing a roadshow to encourage adoption, and at the end of the year, the most successful rising star formats will be added to the IAB’s Universal Ad Package, which represents about 80% of all advertising sold online.

Three. “Protecting Privacy” is another historic cross-industry initiative, a collaboration among six major trade associations to develop a self-regulatory program to assure that consumers’ privacy rights and expectations are met in interactive advertising environments. Because the technology underlying interactivity isn’t well understood by laypeople, we’ve left ourselves open to assault by anti-business groups that want to curtail the reach and effectiveness of interactive media. This self-regulatory program – and important complementary measures, such as the Code of Conduct for IAB member companies passed by our association’s Board – will assure consumers the transparency, choice, and control they want over what they receive, and keep our industry free from onerous, inexpert regulation.

Four. Our “Data Demystification” initiative is exactly that – an effort to explain to the industry and develop best practices for the otherwise arcane world of demand-side platforms, real-time-bidding platforms, and more broadly for the use of data in online advertising relationships. This builds on the very successful “Primer on Data Usage and Control” published by IAB last year, the only publication of its kind in our industry.

Five. The IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence is a mini-IAB within the IAB – a separate unit, funded by a group of some 15 member companies, that will devote resources to market and consumer research, mobile advertising case studies, executive training and education, supply chain standardization, creative showcases and best practice identification in the burgeoning field of mobile media and marketing.

Six. Finally, our “Supply Chain Simplification” initiative is a vital effort to take complexity and cost out of the transaction flow in interactive media. This year, we expect to publish guidelines that will make it easier for marketers, agencies and media to understand the ins and outs of ad verification, which is otherwise adding unnecessary complexity to interactive advertising. We’ll be rolling out an impressions exchange that will help eliminate discrepancies from post-buy billing.

Min: Online privacy emerged as a pressing issue for online advertising this year. Major media brands, however, do not seem to have been as involved in the conversation. What role will content publishers play in protecting their brands and their audiences from bad practices?

Rothenberg: That’s actually not true at all. The Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising that underlie the self-regulatory program launched by our Digital Advertising Alliance were developed by a task force that included Time Warner, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Walt Disney Co., and News Corp., plus a score of major brand marketers and agencies. The associations that make up the DAA represent more than 5,000 leading U.S. companies across all of the key businesses in the marketing-media ecosystem. And the IAB Board, which includes not only the media companies named above but such other branded publishers as The New York Times, Hearst, Meredith, Condé Nast, CBS, NBC Universal and many others, voted unanimously to adopt the principles and the self-regulatory program into our Member Code of Conduct.

What media companies must now do is follow suit. The must sign up for the DAA, use the icon that identifies behavioral advertising environments, and participate in the program that provides their users ways to opt out of online behavioral advertising if they so desire.

Companies collecting or using information for behavioral advertising are encouraged to visit AboutAds.info to acquire and begin displaying the Advertising Option Icon, signaling their utilization of behavioral advertising and adherence to the Principles. Interested companies engaged in behavioral advertising can also register to participate in the easy-to-use consumer opt-out mechanism on the AboutAds.info site.

Min: Mobile use has accelerated faster than many expected. What role will the IAB have in helping to establish ad formats, accountability and best practices for this platform?

Rothenberg: The IAB has already started playing a role fostering the growth of mobile, and our launch of the Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence reaffirms our commitment to mobile. On March 1, for the first time, standardized key metrics for measuring advertisements have been established for the mobile interactive industry. Developed in a joint effort by the IAB, the Mobile Marketing Association and with the assistance of Media Ratings Council, the “Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines” provide a framework to govern how ad impressions are counted on the mobile Web. We have also released the Prevailing Mobile In- Application Ad Formats as well as the Mobile Buyers Guide.

We also have brought on board Anna Bager, a former senior executive from Ericsson, to run the Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, and she and the Board of the Center have mapped out an ambitious agenda for the year, including research to highlight mobile advertising opportunities, a standardized API to smooth the delivery of mobile rich media ads, and an IAB Rising Stars competition to identify effective mobile ad formats. Feel free to visit the site for further details:

Min: Now that you have spent some time with a major magazine publisher, what are your thoughts on the unrealized opportunities for print brands online? Many magazine brands have an uneven history on the web and are still struggling to match the traffic and mind share that Web start ups in their category have achieved. Do you have any general advice for magazine publishers about how they can be more effective online than they have been?

Rothenberg: I think this is a fantastic time for content brands generally, and especially those that live across multiple platforms. While it’s offered the world a steady stream of innovation, the constant development of new media devices, platforms, and delivery systems has created a sea of chaos for both consumers and customers. Media brands – and consumer brands generally – are anchors in that sea of chaos. Their content is recognized, revered, enjoyed, and trusted. It’s branded content that makes devices and platforms stand out.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t serious challenges. Incumbent media brands need to become much better and faster at innovation. They don’t need scale as much as they need relevant scale – the chase for direct response dollars has not done well for them, so they must learn to manage a portfolio of products and services to meet a full range of marketing and advertising needs. They require technology strategies to assure that their product development capabilities aren’t held hostage by IT departments whose primary charge is to keep the enterprise running.

But if they get this right, there’s enormous upside. As the IAB/Bain “Building Brands Online” study showed, marketers are hungry for strategies and campaigns that live across multiple platforms. This is good news for magazine publishers