Media Companies Want Standards Around Web Analytics
SAN FRANCISCO -- Media companies and advertisers are frustrated with the variety of data vendors selling Web analytics information, each with its own methods and practices, said executives with Turner Broadcasting and MTV Networks during a panel at the eMetrics Summit late Monday. MTV Networks has put a task force together to audition new social media monitoring vendors, said Shari Cleary, vice president of digital media research for entertainment and games. When the company ultimately selects one to work with, “I'm sure we'll be questioned about why we didn’t go with another,” she said.
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Standardization will occur when all the industry players -- media companies, advertisers, ad agencies and technology vendors -- come together to say “this has to get done,” Cleary said. “I don’t think any of us will be in 100 percent agreement, but we've got to get close enough to define” terms as simple as “what is a full episode?” she said. Standardization will be the “next big step” for digital media, said Colin Coleman, senior director of data strategy for Turner Broadcasting System. “People are looking for standards."
The marketing industry has yet to figure out how to identify and extract value out of social media, said Michael Metz, Cisco director of Web marketing and strategy. “One of the things I see us struggling with as an industry is measuring the social media impact on the business,” he said during an earlier panel about analytics and marketing. “There’s so much excitement and so much apparent value, that we don’t have a much of a choice to move into it right now,” he said. “But the connection to the bottom line is tenuous at best,” he said.
The industry needs to stay ahead of government attempts to regulate the sector, such as a mandated online behavioral ad opt-out or opt-in, Coleman said. “I think the industry does owe a big burden of responsibility back to the politicians and the population at large” to explain how the online Web analytics and behavioral advertising technology works, and what the industry is doing, he said. “And it’s not just ‘You're reading about it in the newspaper,'” he said. If strict regulations are written, “we just have to be prepared for it,” he said.
So far, the industry is doing “a pretty good job” staying in front of government pressure, said Jon Ingalls, general manager of BlueKai, a Web analytics and optimization technology vendor. The incentive to do so is huge because online behavioral advertising will be lucrative, Ingalls said. “The industry needs to protect the forward movement of this thing.” Government is too far behind the industry to set meaningful regulations, Tapan Patel, global marketing manager for the business analytics vendor SAS, said in an interview. But companies will soon develop ways to better communicate with consumers and allow for more opt-in and opt-out, he said. “Vendors and consumers are driving a lot of the technology changes in the area,” he said. “The government is so much behind when it comes to Web 2.0 technologies, and I don’t know how much legal background they can provide in terms of writing new laws and providing policies around it.”