Mobile Advertisers Demand Unified Measurement Standards
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By Levi Shapiro
It doesn't take a vivid imagination to predict what the No. 1 topic will be after the November election: the weak economy and how to improve return on investments. While a slow-down in advertising spending represents an unprecedented opportunity to migrate ad dollars to the mobile space, that will not happen until standardized measurement systems are in place. For example, last month Chrysler's CMO Deborah Meyer announced 30 percent of the embattled car-company's ad-spend will move to digital. Unfortunately, it was also reported spending for "experimental" platforms, including mobile, would be cut in half. Mobile advertising desperately needs a unified measurement standard to help brands, agencies and publishers quantify ROI.
History suggests the process is slow. Although the first TV commercial aired July 1, 1941 (a 10-second billboard with voice-over for Bulova during a baseball game), it was 10 more years before the A.C. Nielsen Company's Audimeter became the industry's recognized standard for television audience measurement.
For their part, agencies are frustrated. "What is most glaringly absent is a mobile equivalent of persistent cookie tracking," said Dr. Yaakov Kimelfeld, senior vice president and director of Analytics at Mediavest. "Without unified tracking, mobile campaigns are destined to exist in some parallel world." He also said he believes online criteria, like click-throughs and downloads, "play only a marginal role in decisions to increase mobile budgets. The metrics that matter vary in each case, depending on the campaign."
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