I have recently written about the WOMMA Guidebook on Measurement and Metrics for Word of Mouth Marketing (PDF) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) guidelines on social media ad metrics (PDF).
The World Federation of Advertiser (WFA) also released a position paper on online audience measurement recently, which has some interesting overlaps with the other two documents.
The objective of the WFA position paper is to “help inform current and future efforts to advance online audience measurement by providing advertisers’ constructive input on this vital issue”. It uses the WFA Media Charter – an attempt by advertisers “to create and promote a framework and environment within which they can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of media as vehicles for marketing communication” — to identify what advertisers want from online metrics.
The WFA paper sees “online commercial communications” as a “component of a larger media mix”, most similar to direct marketing and online-database (CRM) communications. It sees the evolutionary messy nature of the internet as a challenge and its interactivity as an opportunity.
The paper recommends that “digital/interactive media should embrace the same standards and practices as traditional ones, but should also allow improvements that capture the potential of the medium.” It also suggests that “to make possible media choices, resource allocation, ROI projections and post-analyses” online audience measurement systems “should also be structurally and technically ready to be integrated into larger cross-media, consumer-centric, holistic systems.”
WFA wants the audience measurement system to be set up and managed (or at least monitored) by an independent joint industry committee and seeks the sponsorship and active involvement of ESOMAR and the ARF to develop guidelines on “the methodology for the setup of the measurement system, its management, the metrics and definitions, the production and delivery of the results, the controls and validation procedures.”
I think that the WFA approach to online audience measurement is comprehensive and commendable. It accurately captures the attitude of most marketers towards the internet and succinctly summarizes what they value most in online metrics. However, it suffers from the same perspective problem that the IAB and WOMMA guidelines suffer from.
IAB, WOMMA and WFA are all seeing the world from their own narrow perspective.
IAB and WFA see the internet as a medium and internet users as “audiences”, who need to be profiled, so that ads can be effectively targeted at them, and then measured. What IAB and WFA miss is that the internet isn’t really a medium in the same sense TV, radio, print and outdoors are. On the internet, people aren’t only consumers, they are also creators and curators.
WOMMA seems to understands that, but like IAB and WFA, fails to appreciate that online measurement is fundamentally different from offline measurement, because behavioral data is scarce offline but abundant online. Offline research has to rely on sampling, by default, but the abundance of behavioral data on the internet makes it possible to measure the universe, instead of extrapolating it from the sample.
I am part of a Society for New Communications Research/ Web Analytics Association committee that is working on best practices on social media analytics, and we will hope to build on the strengths of these three sets of guidelines and avoid their pitfalls.
