OPA Blog

I popped in and out of these Knowledge Centre sessions during the afternoon and some of them were fascinating. The first was from Akamai and their new analytics layer for video (Flash, Silverlight and iPhone). It looks really robust and allows media owners to answer questions like; “Does better video quality improve content engagement?” - a tough question for our market due to our relatively kak bandwidth, but interesting none the less. Further, it seems analytics providers are opening up their platforms to integrate with media owner’s custom meta data, to create unique reports. Throughout the presentation, product manager James Hutchens kept saying how the data improves “programming decisions”, but I must say I don’t quite understand it. Doesn’t programming relate to scheduled broadcasting rather than on-demand media? I’ll have to find him tomorrow and understand what he meant.

Next of interest was Brandwatch, who monitor social media. Seems they’re the leader in the space locally dominated by Quirk’s Brandseye. This area of audience measurement is gaining importance, and these guys seem to have built a content query and reporting approach that can actually give a customer a monetary value for ROI if they react to social media messages about their brand. Not my thing, but understand how its part of the mix.

The pure measurement companies that I saw were all interesting and different in approach. A new player called Alenty showed amazing tech using AJAX to monitor much more of what is actually viewed on a page (rather than what is assumed to be viewed because the page loaded). Really impressive stuff. Effective Measure seem to have become a major emerging market force. They focused on their market insights rather than their solution, which was very relevant to us in SA. They focus on Asia and the Middle East, and have similar trends in mobile phone use to deal with. During the smoke break, I landed up being invited out for dinner with their CEO.

Two of the strongest presentations I saw were from Eyeblaster and Visible Measures. Both are thinking differently about the space, and I think they’re onto something. Visible Measures believe intently that video is the medium that will bring brand advertising spend into the digital realm - I hope so, it has eluded us all thus far! Eyeblaster had a brilliant show that took us through just how complicated the world of advertising production and placement has become in a digital, real-time world. In essence, digital marketing is too complex, and it is the major inhibitor to increasing spend.

I had to miss the rest of the presentations due to the round table, but have setup private meetings with all the key measurement vendors over the next 2 days to ensure I get a clear picture of the current landscape.

The content of the round table discussion cannot be made public at this stage, but a statement may be released by ICOM later in the week. What I can say is that we have a good set of experiences to share as a case study, and that we can learn a lot from our peers in other markets if we want to get the basics right and avoid many mistakes that have been made by others. I plan to actively engage with more organisations globally in the year ahead.

I’ve just returned from dinner with the guys from Effective Measure and a few others. Got to see a bit of Lisbon which was a plus. I sadly missed presentations from Google, ComScore, Nielsen and Quantcast due to the round-table. Tomorrow is another day though, and I’ll be sure to catch up.

Tags: ajax, eyeblaster, icom, Measurement, quirk, social media