Archive for the ‘Behavioural Targeting’ Category
January 31, 2010
“will be celebrating Australia Day with some gardening, a barbie, drinks & a swim with friends and tripleJ hottest 100 playing in background.”theother66, Twitter, January 25th
“They really f**ked it up this time. Can’t believe the effect that spoiling the Hottest 100 is having on youth around me.” Downesy, Twitter, January 22nd
“Did I mention that I am disappointed with the @triplej hottest 100? The top 10 especially offends me. And probably gave me herpes too.” Mversion, Twitter, January 26th
In 2010, the “world’s biggest music democracy”, Triple J’s Hottest 100, smashed all previous year’s efforts with an incredible level of listener engagement. More than 131,000 individuals cast 1.1 million votes for what its audience considered to be 2009’s hottest 100 tracks. Both the number of voters, and hence votes, were up 30 percent and 46 percent respectively.
Passive listening is one thing, but to vote and use the whole program as the basis for celebration on Australia Day – 4,100 Hottest 100 parties is not an apparition – is a testament to the public broadcaster and the eclectic tastes (and passions) of Triple J listeners.
Celebration and criticism of the final rankings aside, is the Hottest 100 more than just a gang-up of Muse and Art vs Science fans to game the results? Is the list a potential bellwether of illegal music consumption and the popularity of those tracks? What would a Darkest 100 look like?
Tracks in this year’s Triple J Hottest 100 accounted for more than 17 million illegal downloads in the past four weeks; that’s out of a total of more than 35 million in a ‘usual’ four week period. An impressive ‘market share’ for a public broadcaster!
While Mumford & Son’s Little Lion Man topped the Hottest 100, the track was ranked fourth in the illegal chart, with 698,528 downloads. The top spot in our Darkest 100 was taken by La Roux’s Bulletproof with 1.3m illegal downloads, up five places from its Hottest 100 ranking. By comparison, Hilltop Hoods’ Chase That Feeling came in third on both charts (760,312 downloads).
The tracks swinging wildly between their Hottest 100 spot and the illegal chart included Calvin Harris’ I’m Not Alone, ranked fifth in the illegal download chart (626,142 downloads) - a massive 54 places up on its popular vote (ranked 59 in the Hottest 100) - while Foo Fighter’s Wheels, ranked last by the Triple J audience, came in at number 12 in the Darkest 100 chart (452,583 downloads). Jet’s She’s A Genius jumped 62 spots, from 77 in the Hottest 100 to 15 in the illegal ranks (412,332 downloads).
The high profile results of Unearthed bands in the Hottest 100, however, weren’t exactly replicated on the Darkest 100. Art vs Science, coming in at number two on the Hottest 100, dropped 53 places on the illegal chart, accounting for just 75,048 downloads. Despite the drop, the band is still number one out of all the Unearthed bands when it came to downloads. Seth Sentry accounted for 66,880 downloads, a big drop of 29 places on the Darkest 100, Philadelphia Grand Jury accounted for 37,882 downloads (down 83 spots) while The Middle East had 24,737 downloads (down just 6 spots). Interestingly, Art vs Science’s Friend in the Field ranked 73 on both charts.
In terms of music type, the Darkest 100 is better suited to dance, rock and hip hop, while the indies were, to put it bluntly, murdered by the alternative chart. On average, indie tracks dropped 25 places on the illegal chart, while bands with more commercial radio play, tended to score higher positions on the Darkest 100.
The Hottest 100 is a testament to popular culture, a love of great music and a countdown, in more ways than one, of how modern Australia chooses to consume music.
Source: PeerIn-Big Champagne Australia 2010
August 1, 2009
Recently, a rather old-fashioned word crept into our popular vocabulary - “narrative”. The thematic qualities of this term resemble a story’s ‘arc’ or the more sinister ‘sub-text’.
Whatever the moniker, this broader, almost minimalist approach to identifying what actuality matters in the ‘scheme of things’ is both a waste saver and a potential red light to crowds powered by the sheep mentality.
In the language of the dismal science, a macro-trend is just such an arc. Standing back, absorbing this vista means taking in a new perspective, and perhaps a new conclusion.
Such an approach has a habit of making the otherwise absurd, obtuse and the downright ambiguous as clear as crystal.
Take for example the synopsis that, for at the least next 50 years, Australia will never suffer a recession, a slow-down perhaps, but never two quarters of negative growth.
This brash, binary call isn’t presumptive at all. Taking your eyes off the next pothole, and back onto the horizon, you realise Asia’s middle class isn’t yet, relatively speaking, a mass market; that’s still a century into the future.
In the meantime, Australia’s minerals, agricultural produce and intellectual property will be sucked northwards like a twister in the sky, fuelling smelters, stomachs and minds.
A macro-trend of that magnitude won’t be diverted, or distracted, by a case of broker embezzlement, Chicken flu or even the next Al Qaeda suitcase bomb.
Ergo, Australia is recession-proof for the next half century.
Another macro trend relates to the long-term consequences of a networked world and the digitisation of assets, particularly intellectual property.
Social media in all its clever and hard-to-monetise guises, is its own type of macro trend. Like the ‘golden rule’ that economic growth requires the consumption of commodities, the ‘rule’ of social media is that the more people broadcast their lives, the more self-aware they become of the ‘content’ of their routines, including the experiences and memories that punctuate their days.
Put plainly, the larger and more active our digital networks become, the more we need to entertain these ‘audiences’ with worthy anecdotes and clever impressions.
Social networks are not sustained by the mundane, the average or ‘middle of the road’, they glow white hot with what we can muster that is ‘jagged and shiny’.
From this point onwards, the macro trend we call social media takes on a new persona – a mass audience and mass market for the unique, the tangible, and the experiential that cannot be replicated by processing lines of code.
Importantly, this shift is not based on the division of wealth, where the less well off are subjected to a commoditised, homogenised existence. On the contrary, the attribute of wealth is in fact neutered by the intellectual and creative elements that increasingly dictate terms. The artisan, the scientist, the explorer – these are the new rule makers. They personify a new aesthetic, largely detached from the materialism that has characterised the ‘acquisitor age’ (Ravi Batra).
It is this aesthetic that now ignites a more authentic introspection on the part of so many more individuals; indeed, a more widespread perspective on what contributes to happiness and wellbeing.
This search for quality, uniqueness and beauty is nothing new, only the scale of the phenomenon has altered; a scale made possible by the diffusion of network technology and our desire to broadcast ourselves committing to new experiences and a re-weighting of particular values.
The trajectory of this macro trend, or social arc, is unstoppable. Being on the cusp of this mass movement, where an increasing number of individuals now put their lives, their decisions and their associations into perspective, means institutions likewise must now recast their own assumptions about consumer motivations and political relations.
May 4, 2009
An interesting article published in the UK last week asked the provocative question: are we drowning in music? In other words, has the currency of music been irretrievably de-valued by the rising tied of mediocrity? (And no, that wasn’t a mixed metaphor).
This post isn’t about to answer that question, but the insight does provides a nice introduction into the world of music entertainment and the growing plethora of online, music-related sites. In Australia, the ranks of music streaming and retail services will shortly be joined by the likes of Guvera, MyDJ and the gorilla of them all, MySpace Music - the latter scheduled for release before Christmas.
We’re not short on services, but what about demand? At what point do we reach saturation where the audience hygiene audience factors start to drop, and in turn, the CPM rates for ad-based music services also start to weaken? But that’s a whole other can of worms.
There are two market metrics Victrix uses here: Nielsen and Comscore. The former suggests online music entertainment has in fact peaked, and now skims along at about 3m uniques a month (March 09) - down from 3.4m in March 08.
In comparison, Comscore considers the glass half-full, and reckons the audience for online music entertainment has grown 21% in the last 12 months, to 4.3m uniques a month (March 09). Again, this isn’t about picking a fight with one or both of the world’s largest panel methodologies; I’ll leave you to ponder the reasons for the discrepancies in audience figures before a more informed opinion is expressed. Both figures exclude online music retailers (and associated applications).
However, where one platform seems to reflect a depleted, almost exhausted market for music entertainment, the other is reporting double-digit growth; not just in terms of the overall sector, but for individual players, including Last.FM - up 115% to 342,000 uniques a month - and even locals visiting MySpace Music (US) - up 72% to 935,000 uniques a month.
Other strong players include MTV Networks (again AUS visitors to US sites) up 60% year-on-year, Universal Music Group up 52%, and the ABC’s Triple J, up 25%.
These audience stats aren’t the makings of an exhausted or confused listening audience. Far from it. In fact, with improved AI and smarter curatorial processes (behavioural targeting), online music entertainment will only evolve into a more relevant service offering.
August 13, 2008
There is something very elegant about seeing the juxtaposition of a bad news story and a product promotion unintentionally triggered by key words in the story; the assumption being that every story carrying the key words will always have positive connotations, reflecting well on the promotion.
Enter the amazing, world changing iPhone. Zealots would have you believe the handset has, well…cred worthy of zealots. Others are more pragmatic in their attitude and consider the handset (no, its not a portal to the universe or a window to the soul) to be overpriced and now oversold on connectivity speed.
Well, that’s not the real story. The more interesting angle is how the market assumes iPhone will always be in the ‘good books’ with nothin to fear in a reputational sense, unlike Microsoft and its Vista/Yahoo debacles.
With that sort of assumption gaining ground, compounded by the cred of having something innovative to package around the iPhone, i.e. being first to market with an iPhone application, the scene is set for some diabolical encounters between product reviews and promotions, aided by another much hyped technology - ad targeting.
Cutting to the chase. Exhibit 1. is a story in the SMH about the issue of iPhone technology being incompatiable with 3G networks, both in Australia and worldwide. Telcos are putting the blame squarely in Apple’s court, and Apple in response, is deadly quiet. As an aside, if Apple doesn’t deal with this issue head-on, the likes of Nokia will eat their lunch when the next generation of handsets are released.
Exhibit 2. Thanks to the magic of word-association (without any consideration of the context in which these words are used) CommSec ads are splashed across the entire story - banners, boxes, the works. Ironically, this is when display advertising gets noticed really well.
CommSec seem to be very chaffed about their new iPhone trading application, and they wear the badge of ‘innovators’ all over their sleeves. Trouble is, the accompanying story goes to great length to point out the service outages currently being experienced by iPhone users; not the sort of thing you want to happen when you’re trading the last of your superannuation on a Chinese-hedged managed fund!
One question: shouldn’t the publisher or agency alert the advertiser of the issue, or even better, be proactive enough and pull the campaign’s word-association parameters when there’s a whiff of bad press? Just a suggestion.
August 10, 2008
Those of you who are more perceptive of systems change (others will refer to it as the Zeitgeist) will recognise the Internet’s morphing from a web of documents to a web of people, sweeping aside the traditional, but authoritative role of documentation for the emotive and subjective language of opinion and assumption. Remember, we’re all experts now!
In essence, this change is about electronic word-of-mouth (WOM) or consumer generated media (CGM) ripping holes in the delicate fabric of corporate positioning strategies. Reputations built more on spin and less on actual service and product quality are first in the firing line.
Given then how this ‘ripple effect’ is an obvious business risk, where’s the commercial will to employ analytics to quantify both the speed and direction of this consumer shock waves? Where’s the emphasis on sentiment as a precursor to consumer behaviour?
And that’s the key.
Sentiment analysis (and its poorer cousin, sentiment mining, which is done by the likes of BuzzMetrics, BlogPulse etc.) is the canary in the mine. If done well ( meaning comprehensive, robust samples, with more human interevention than software application), sentiment analysis identifies more than just frequency of expression; it determines market drivers and inhibitors to commercial and organisation growth. It’s as simple as that.
The Twitter example above, highlights a rudimentary form of sentiment analysis, this time focused on the commentary swirling around recent movie releases. A more ambitious analysis would seek to develop correlations or relationships between sales performance or brand equity and the quantums associated with positive/negative sentiment.
The difficulties of using automation to conduct this type of analysis are obvious. Much of the current debate dealing with sentiment analysis is focused on how software can reduce the number of false positives without compromising on the efficiencies of scanning/spidering billions of characters in a cost-effective manner.
The alternative is a hybrid solution involving people (i.e. analysts), with the obvious drawback on volumes and expense. Nevertheless, the rules of sample methodology are equally applicable here as they are elsewhere, suggesting conclusions with high confidence levels can be reached without necessary trawling every online comment or opinion piece.
The bottom line: which is more effective when it comes to semantic orientation classification - man or machine?
Fortunately, this isn’t a battle the machines are likely to win. Quiet simply, the value of sentiment analysis is only fully optimised when context is taken into account, alongside the sentiment of opinion/comments being scrapped. In other words, the value in determining an overwhelming negative or positive sentiment is only realised when we also have insights into the beliefs, personalities, community, influence and authority of the individuals making the actual comments.
And this can’t be condensed or modelled into an algorithm - no matter how hard Google tries.
July 24, 2008
Putting aside practical issues such as fact checking and the legal necessities required to avoid contempt of court, the winds of change within the professional media circuit clearly flag that publishers and other outlets can no longer afford to sustain products which are produced exclusively by professional journalists, writers and film crews.
Instead, the mix is increasingly being diluted by social or community contributions. These ‘contributions’ are, more often than not, appearing as direct content pieces, but emerging is another type of contribution - that of personal data, including editorial preferences.
In effect, the media’s expertise in news gathering and analysis is now being de-constructed to follow several agendas at once, each serving key customer segments, rather than the one agenda which has previously been set by the outlet’s editorial team.
A very recent example of this trend is the association now developing between the New York Times and LinkedIn. Aggregated data on occupations, geographic spread and other details are being used by the paper to make its editorial coverage more relevant to readers, or in this case, members of LinkedIn.
There is nothing unusual in media outlets market researching their audience to determine profiles and story preferences, but linking part of its editorial coverage to a dynamic membership base like LinkedIn, where profile characteristics are changing every day, if not every hour, is a new proposition in audience engagement. And this time, the information is incredibly granular, as opposed to the handful of traditional psychographic segments so loved by market researchers.
A sudden surge in membership from a certain industry vertical, for example, (the above image highlights energy professionals) would flag a requirement to re-evaluate existing reporting around energy issues, and perhaps force the paper to re-focus its efforts in this area. Hypothetically, several such insights or changes could emerge during the day, placing considerable pressure on resource allocation to capitalise on new members and secure their loyalty by demonstrating an immediate insight into issues relevant to their profile through editorial coverage.
In dealing with an influx of new readers who are engaged in energy production, for example, the paper could produce a special feature on carbon trading systems around the world, canvassing a range of professional opinions (including some from LinkedIn members!).
In broader terms, this dynamic transfer of audience details (in aggregated form) provides the media outlet with two positive outcomes. Firstly, it secures a more engaged audience, improving retention and acquisition metrics. Secondly, advertisers now have fantastically improved methods of validating audiences, which in turn creates greater value for sponsors and brands.
But before any of this can happen, media of all persuasions must recognise that data strategies, particularly those around audience profiling, including the identification of behavioural characteristics and preferences, are needed to not only negate the risks and general loss of control associated with UGC, but to go some way towards repairing an arguably broken revenue model.
July 16, 2008
In June the En-Score for the Australian Internet hit 345.55, up from 307.12 in June 07. As a refresher, the En-Score is a measure of online engagement, whether across an entire market, a single industry or specific site. The score is a reflection of audience ‘quality’ as opposed to a pure audience metric detailing the number of people (or browsers) visiting the site. The hypothesis is that any digital channel should have a single point of reference indicating depth of engagement, not just the size of its audience.
In the context of the broader market, this score is also a fair indicator of the average household’s dedication to the Internet vis a vis other media options, particularly television. As the index moves north of 400 some very serious questions have to be asked regarding the inevitable decline of engagement with other media types. Further cross-media analysis is certainly warranted on this issue.
For digital publishers, in particular, this continued upward trend in the market’s En-Score is an important indicator that the medium is taking a larger slice of the attention economy - to the detriment of mainstream media.
Breaking down June’s aggregate figure into specific verticals, such as news, entertainment, finance, automotive, careers, real estate and multi-category commerce, illustrates very comprehensively the overwhelming domination of entertainment as a digital genre (en-score: 23.8) - more than three times the engagement associated with news (6.8) and finance (6.9), and more than twice that of e-commerce (11).
Within the entertainment category, the star performer is TabOnline (14.5), followed by nineMSN Games (9.2) and iTunes (5.7). In the music sub-set, iTunes has a slight lead over AOL Music (5.2), but a significant lead over Yahoo!7 Music (1.7) and BigPond Music (0.15).
Compared with the top entertainment sites, the news category pales in comparison and doesn’t bode well for the sector. The top performer in June was Fairfax (2.9), followed by News Digital Media (2.3), the Weather Channel (1.8) and nineMSN News (1.2). Interestingly, the En-Score for the Washington Post was 1.2, well ahead of some Australian online news services, including BigPond News (0.4) and Yahoo!7 News (0.4).
12 months earlier (June 07) the news category had an En-Score of 6.3, compared to the current figure of 6.8 - a difference of 8%. Over the same period, the medium’s En-Score rose 12.5% (from 307 to 346), suggesting that over time online news providers are loosing share in the attention economy comparable to their offline peers.
July 6, 2008
Digital advertising is a peculiarly asymmetrical place. When the effectiveness of one piece in the strategy begins to wain, another piece is devised or conceptualised. The coincidence of a decline in the online display market currently (or at least its confirmed slow-down) with the emergence of social media (and associated applications), as a panecea for this increasing budgetry void, should not be lost on anyone.
Yet in the haste to create a new poster child (mobile is next), a healthy dose of scepticism has gone MIA. This is not to say social media technologies are a convenient but ineffectual fade - far from it. This maturing of the Internet to include peer networking, open sourcing and meta-data architecture is clearly the genesis of a transformation in communications which will impact every facet of human endeavour in the long-term.
Like Grandpa Jo said about Wonka Vision: “It will change the world.”
Yet, what has been the overwhelming response of the commercial world to this obvious inflection point in world history? In short, to give itself a choice between either a CPM or CPC deal! Is this as good as it gets?
As previously discussed on these pages, the context of most social media platforms experiencing high levels of activity and recency is one of High Context, where networks of individuals discuss, debate and share information of a personal and private nature. There is simply no room for advertising and its ROI considerations, no matter how sophisticated the targeting.
This is not to say there is no allowance for commercial entities to engage a market via social media architecture. In fact, if done with consideration of its High Context pedigree, a commercial social media channel can have some extraordinarily positive implications for the brand.
Faced with an option to design and build a customer-centric social network, or at the very least, pay good money to participate in a more broadly designed social paltform (like Facebook), the organisation must recognise the very investment in technology which empowers customers to ‘collaborate’ is already an implicit act of brand reinforcement.
In other words, the organisation is now in the game but should play in the backroom, mindful that being subtle in a High Context environment will be always be recognised by participants; there is simply no need to force the issue.
The challenge, however, is to avoid building short-term ROI templates around these social media investments, where next quarter’s sales figures have a higher priority than longer-term customer retention issues. If this can’t be avoided, then the advice is simple: avoid social media altogether as a marketing mechanism.
If, however, the organisation is prepared to commit to social media architecture as part of a broader CRM and Customer Experience Management (CEM) strategy, then consider the following points as a guide to building the required dynamic:
- Can the platform be designed around the particular needs of customers as opposed to a list of wants?
- Recognise that a customer base fragmented by geography, socio-demographics, technology and even psychology will enrich the platform, and hence provide greater value back to customers. Fragmentation/segmentation like this is a strength;
- Always provide the option of anonymity without penalising the user through a lesser experience. The architecture’s priority is to encourage collaboration between customers, not to probe into a customer’s identity;
- Insist on transparency with regards to issues and opinions expressed by constituents. The more diversity of opinion, the higher the incidence of collaboration;
- Encourage storytelling around experiences before encouraging customers to open their wallets;
- Be prepared to intervene in issues by way of professional advice; never let matters go unresolved.
If these points suggest the organisation is expected to make a commitment to understand a customer’s lifestyle and their own networks, then that is indeed the right conclusion. If, however, the resident CMO is scared of the ‘C’ word, then for the sake of not wasting everyone’s time, the CMO should also drop “social media” from their lexicon as well.
July 1, 2008
The virtue of simplex thinking is to explain or interpret complex and disparate data through the use of simple, elegant metaphors and models. Hence the development of the Engagement Scale, or En-Scale for short.
The purpose is to define and compare web sites and services using a single number which reflects the site engagement of a typical user. The scale is based on a simple algorithm which weights session times, frequency as well as pages per session. The source for this analysis is Nielsen’s Netview data, which has been denegrated in the past for its lack of representativeness.
The En-Scale doesn’t rely on audience figures, instead it focuses on site engagement metrics recorded by the sample. In effect, En-Scale recognises the panelists as a type of useability group, though in the case of NetView the sample is significantly larger than any other comparable resource.
Further, the sample is genuinely ‘objective’ in terms of how they navigate and engage with the site. That is, the panelists are not conscious of themselves as research ’subjects’ and adjusting their behaviour accordingly.
This is the first time (to VM’s knowledge) that Australian digital publishers have been compared to each other based on a an objective performance ratio. In the case of En-Scale, the higher the number, the higher the engagement or visitor association.
As the above example illustrates, over a 12-month period (from May 07 to May 08) some publishers have improved their position, including Fairfax, Google and YouTube, while others have experienced a signficant decline in their En-Scale, most notiably Yahoo!7, eBay and Fox Interactive. It’s clear from the above data cut that applications (search, IM, bidding engines etc.) have an immediate impact on a site’s En-Scale.
For this reason, it is preferable to compare scores within a particular subject vertical, like news and information, than it is to compare a set of very disparate sites.
Moving forward, En-Scale will be deployed each month, enabling a month-by-month account of changing scores, following a remit to better understand the relationship between the changes in a site’s En-Scale and its audience share. For example, could En-Scale act as an early warning mechanism of comparable changes in audience numbers? VM will explore the issue further.
En-Scale should also be applied to specific demographics as well. Case in point: eBay.
The online auction site has an En-Scale of 10.98 (May 08) which is very high. However, breaking that down into age segments reveals that for the 12 to 7 age group the En-Scale is 3.6, while for people older than 35, the score is 14.1 which is close to a market high.
For the record, the site with the highest En-Score in May 08 was Facebook on 14.7, followed by Electronic Arts on 12.3 and Stardoll on 11.18. eBay was fourth on 10.98.
June 27, 2008
The Beta release of Google’s AdPlanner has many hackers celebrating a type of renaissance in online audience measurement, where to paraphrase the sentiment, ‘Comscore and Nielsen et al are history’! Well, not so fast.
Act 1. There’s little argument that audience measurement products which rely on panel methodology do, by-and-large, underepresent visitor numbers, even for the largest of sites. Further, panel data effectively evaporates as site numbers become smaller, undermining any meaninful analysis of content-specific or niche sites populating the ‘long tail’.
Act 2. Enter the world’s largest publisher, toying with an ambition to provide the market with the most accurate audience measurement system available, supposedly offering objective data across other competing publishers, as well as the plethora of sites hosting Adwords (which can include major publishers as well).
But lets clarify exactly what this audience data actually entails. This from the horse’s mouth:
Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information.
Google Ad Planner demographic information is provided by third-party market research data, opt-in consumer user panel data, and algorithms that improve the demographic estimates.
Google Ad Planner doesn’t use individual site-level information from Google Analytics. Instead, Google Ad Planner uses Google Analytics data in an anonymous and aggregate fashion. Google Analytics data is combined with other data sources to calibrate macro-level insights into website traffic patterns, site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.
Can the methodology be any more vague, or less transparent?
Yes the industry needs more demographic depth, and better comparative data using site-centric (ie cookie-based) figures, but this data mash-up using unverifiable data sources seems like a step-backwards, and one which favours sites already aligned to Google’s AdWords network. In other words, if you don’t have AdWords, you’re going to come off second best in the AdPlanner’s “powerful computer algorithms”. How does this help the broader goal of optimising online adspend?
In Australia, Google’s AdPlanner is unlikely to contain demographic data as part of its first release. Instead, what it is most likely to resemble at first blush is Nielsen’s Market Intelligence (MI), which is site ranking platform for specific verticals, including but not limited to, news, sport, real estate, automotive, careers and the like. Combine demographics into this system (through intercept surveys) and you have the AdPlanner concept in practice.
The issue for Nielsen is market reach and a lack of demographic data for audited sites. The number of sites captured by the MI system, for example, is a fraction of Google’s local AdWords content network, leaving many verticals incomplete.
On the flip side, the weakness of Google’s AdPlanner is the perceived conflict of interest, combined with a merky demographics methodology, which seems to have a high degree of extrapolation of what demographics correlate to what sites.
For Australian media planners and buyers, and by extension the much-suffering online publishers, the introduction of Google’s AdPlanner is unlikely to give the market want it desperately needs: a audience measurement currency. In fact, AdPlanner looks set to provide just another audience number with which to compare with a mountain of stats already banking up from the likes of Neilsen Online (MI and NetView), Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics and Roy Morgan.
Oh and one more point, if the reports about Google using its toolbar to further massage site numbers/demographics are correct, then that brings into play the audience methodology used by the Alexa group (owned by Amazon), which itself relies on the download of its toolbar to validate audience reach etc. for sites visited by subscribers. Again, not the perfect sampling method.
Oh the humanity of it all!
