I had an early start yesterday. Too early in fact, as I’m completely zonked. My first meeting was at 6.30am for a demo with Quantcast’s Adam Gerber before he flew out. They’re an aggressive, new player with a free service play for media owners which makes revenue off the back of a targeting platform. They also do demographics by inference on activity across their network. I’m unsure about that for our market due to sample size and the fact that inference rules have to consider a market’s cultural oddities - I would guess that they’ve focused on a US/UK model of behaviour. Its really cool to use their free tools though to see what the US market looks like.

The keynotes were fantastic. I did my duty and tweeted through these (http://twitter.com/joshprefix). Thanks for the comments I got from a some followers. Geoff Ramsay (CEO eMarketer) is a dynamic speaker and a strong character. Very excitable and great insights and predictions. The CEO of comScorewas less excitable, but very well considered and gave me a view into just how big a challenge we face within the sector. You can see that their CEO really takes measurement personally. In chats with his staff, apparently he gets dirty with the algorithms they use and is a real data guy at the core. It permeates in the confidence with which comScore talk about their approach. They certainly think they’re onto the right model with their hybrid model of site beaconing combined with a panel. The best way to get into what was talked about is through Twitter on the #icom tag.

The rest of the day was leaders in specific areas giving short presentations followed by panel debates. I won’t get into it all (see the programme for March 11 for the topics/people; http://i-com.org/global-summit-2010-programme/), but I have 3 key take-aways.

1. The click as a metric has been, well, a bit of a disaster. It hold little value for brand advertisers, and people who do click are actually less desirable audiences than those who don’t it would appear from the research. But it was the simplest of all this digital mess to understand, and now it needs to change.
2. Ad-buyers need a way to compare digital simply to the other mediums they spend on (eg. TV). This is the only way for us get a bigger portion of total advertising spend. People are not sure if GRPs are the answer, but they can be used to make media planners split budgets to digital first on a GRP basis, and then plan on the medium.
3. The measurement industry’s greatest contribution to growth of our sector can be to enable brand advertising in the digital realm. The way I now see it, paid search has succeeded because its quite simple to understand. (match keyword to product and pay). If the analytics and ad-serving platforms can get it right over the next few years to allow brand advertisers to reach desired demographics across many digital properties, we’ll bring the brand advertisers online, and fundamentally shift the spend allocations going forward. Cool huh!?

I had many side-line meetings throughout the day, and have demo’s now from most the measurement vendors. Dinner was at a big casino and I got to sit next to Henry Stevens, Director of Media & Entertainment at GSMA. We had a ripper of a chat about mobile and emerging markets. I learnt a lot from him about the move to get operators more involved in the media side of the mobile business, and how the GSMA is driving that.

Day 3 begins. Will report back tomorrow….

Josh

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.

I introduced myself to a few people and headed into the Ibero-American Summit programme. I’d been given an special invite to this stream of the conference which seeks to give weight to the Latin American industry who are looking at regional solutions. I had hoped to learn some lessons, but this stream wasn’t to be of too much interest to me, and I headed off to join the Knowledge Centre presentations for the rest of the day. The Knowledge Centre was a brilliant series of short presentations from leading vendors on the latest trends. The right place for me to be as far as the OPA is concerned, as it provided a snapshot of the major players and key trends.

So how did I crack an invite? For my sins, I volunteered to be Head of Measurement for the OPA (www.opa.org.za) a year ago. The job is to in essence ensure that South Africa’s internet activity with our online media is appropriately measurement. Its vital to do so to encourage digital marketing spend, which will add fuel to the fire of our industry’s growth as a whole. I-COM’s chairman, a really nice guy by the name of Andreas Cohen, has offered me advice through my tenure so far, and he said we should really come along to learn about the cutting edge approaches and global context of audience measurement… I said okay!

There are key, unique emerging market and South African issues that I hope to be able to share into the conversation. The theme for ICOM this year is “true picture”. The internet moves so fast, that tracking what goes on is perhaps an impossible task, so I’m curious to find out how true a picture one can create while listening to the best and brightest in the field.

On the fun side, I’ve got my 2010 t-shirts and official 2010 laptop bag, and hope to invite as many football mad Europeans as I can home for the soccer. I’ll try and blog as much as I am able with insights.

Follow the event on Twitter of #ICOM

Lastly, and important thank you to the OPA exco for sending me, and to Isobar for assisting with costs of the trip. Nicely done!

Josh

–
Josh Adler | CEO

Adrian Hewlett, MD of Habari Media, has been re-elected as Chairperson. Deputy Chairperson has once again been assigned to CEO of Primedia Online and 365 Digital, Nikki Cockcroft. Cockcroft has also been assigned the new position of Chairperson of the Bookmarks committee.

Hewlett and Cockcroft have been fundamental players in the development of the OPA in the past three years, and together with their committee, have generated significant awareness for the online industry in South Africa. One of their many achievements has been the growth of the Bookmarks, South Africa’s premier online digital awards which has been running for the past two years.

A new appointment to the Executive Committee is Karen Dempers, Marketing Manager of 24.com. Dempers will be taking over from Cockcroft as Head of Marketing and will be responsible for developing the OPA’s marketing strategies.

The rest of the committee remain the same.

They include:

Josh Adler (CEO Prefix) - Head of Measurement

Andrew Lanning (Publisher & Editor - Sport24) - Head of Monitoring

Colin Daniels (Head of Digital at Auto Trader.) - Head of Research

Ben Wagner (MD of Stonewall+ Digital Marketing) - Head of Creative

The membership levels and pricing have been completely overhauled for 2010. This was necessary as the membership base has diversified and grown significantly. The old model doesn’t work as there are too few traffic bands (membership levels) - with too great a gap between them - for members to pay a fee that is reflective of their size relative to the market. The pricing was also complex with many additional and optional costs.

• Number of traffic bands increases from 5 to 10.
• Mobile traffic measurement is included.
• The “Lite” membership level (<50k UB’s) has been done away with and replaced by a page impression threshold (250k PI’s)
• Over 30% of members will see their costs decrease in the new structure, some by as much as 30%.
• Where your fees have increased, it’s generally in line with traffic growth.**
• There is now a clear, affordable “upgrade path” for members to grow their traffic and pay reasonable measurement fees as they do this.

• SiteCensus (SC): Core, User, iPath, Technical, loyalty, Search Engines, Trending & Conversion reports

• SiteSensus Channels are included, and allocations (limits) per band will be sent out shortly.

• Mobile traffic measurement is included for all members.

• Market Intelligence (MI): South Africa Total, Domestic & WAP traffic

• Link Overlay, Segmentation, SC Demographics and SC API are to remain additional and optional services.

2010 pricing for these services will be published shortly.

Introduction:
A year in this position has flown by. A lot has happened in the world of measurement and it is important to deliver a quick update before the OPA AGM this week. Apologies for the long read and please circulate to those in your organization that deal with measurement and technical issues.

Important Announcements!

Nielsen’s pricing for 2010:
This is currently being finalised with a new set of proposed member traffic bands to better reflect the growing and diverse membership base. It will allow people to more easily see how their costs will grow as their traffic grows, and do so in an affordable, scalable manner for all.

We are aware that many members feel that the Nielsen fees are expensive in these tough trading conditions for the media sector. The contract renegotiations have been robust to ensure the mutual interests of our members while ensuring Nielsen are able to offer strong services and support. Importantly, we must all realize that the fees paid offer huge value in our collective ability to attract quality advertising spend to the online medium.

Membership cancellations & the Nielsen 2010 contract
If you do not intend to be part of the OPA during 2010 and pay the required Nielsen fees, please inform Theresa now and remove the Nielsen tags from your website. It makes it very difficult for us as the Nielsen contract takes into account all current members, assuming their participation for the next year.

Nielsen V6 tags – get them in!
We strongly recommend that everyone replaces the tags (tracking code) on their web and mobile sites with the new V6 tags. They are smaller and more efficient, and offer more options for sophisticated users. Please contact Nielsen on careza@nielsen.com for technical documentation and assistance on how to proceed, and get your development teams to work. Why not take the opportunity to do a tag audit on your site, and get the New Year off to a good start!!?

Portfolio Updates
New Market Intelligence demographics survey - done!
As mentioned in July, we needed to revise, approve and implement a new demographics survey questionnaire before the end of 2009. This was vital to create a new set of data for 2010 that enabled better online media planning and buying. The new survey is a little longer, but far better segmented with more relevant questions. Much time was spent ensuring as much consistency with AMPS as possible, while of course catering to a digital audience.

I’d like to thank all those that submitted comments to the blog suggesting questions and specifically to Jawwaad Akleker from BDFM’s Business Intelligence unit for his time and insights into the comparisons with the AMPS survey. Nielsen was also very supportive in this, and gave us resources and advice.

The new survey will be live next week.
New site ranking categories & clean-up - done!
As promised, we expanded and refined the categories into which websites can be placed for rankings. The new categories will be implemented in February. There will no doubt be some of you who feel there should be an additional category or that you’re in the wrong place. Suggestions can be sent to Theresa for new categories, although the new categories will remain as they are for another year before revision. Members have until Feb 28th to request changes to the categorization of their sites.

A huge thanks to Colin and Theresa here, as they painstakingly went through every site and proposed where it should go within the new system. A huge task, and one we should all be grateful to them for doing on our behalf. Please do justice to this work by looking at your own sites and raising any issues with your categorization within the rankings as soon as possible with Theresa.

The Rankings are looking a lot cleaner since a year ago. This is largely due to the effort of each member to get their affairs in order and to the Nielsen team for actively pursuing this. If you see brand duplication or confusion in the rankings, please let Theresa know. As mentioned, our collective ability to attract quality spend depends on a clear ranking system.

New Metric: Average Daily Unique Browsers
We introduced this new ranking metric in October, in line with Nielsen’s other markets. It is considered a more accurate reflection of unique browser activity than the monthly metric as it avoids some problems that can be caused by cookies. Nielsen are increasingly releasing the monthly site ranking figures based on the daily average and not the monthly total for unique browsers.

The new exco will decide whether to send out the monthly rankings based on this metric after the AGM, now that people have got used to it and publishers and advertisers have had an opportunity to understand it clearly.

Nielsen vs Google Analytics Survey – done! (but inconclusive)
First, a huge thanks to those that submitted data (almost 50 sites participated). Unfortunately, (and not for lack of trying!) there were too many data inconsistencies in what was available. As a result we were unable come up with any patterns that one could positively identify as a trend to explain why some sites have very big differences between the reported figures from the two systems.

The data did reveal that almost everyone has had periods of relatively large differences in their Google and Nielsen data, and that it is not contained to a particular publisher, content or advertising platform, or approach. Encouragingly, the biggest gaps shrunk or are shrinking. Sites that had large discrepancies in 2008 were much closer in 2009. It is clear they have made efforts to ensure they are tagging the same way for both tools.

Perhaps the biggest take-home is that by using an additional analytics tool, you have a point of comparison for trends and can more easily identify tags that may be incorrect or missing. You can then act on it!

We hope to put in place a technical sub-committee on Measurement for 2010 that will look for trends to help members understand the different measuring tools and provide technical tips through the sharing of collective experience and knowledge.

That said, we did get some nice information about member measurement activities:

44% of those that participated had customized their Google Analytics dashboard. This demonstrates an active interest in getting unique measurement insights.
Only 32% used Nielsen’s content groups (channels) to group and segment their traffic reports in SiteCensus. This was expected, but provides great room for improvement for members to understand different areas of their sites better.
57% use an additional or alternative analytics tool to those from Google and Nielsen.
When asked whose statistics they trusted the most, 42% said Nielsen, 38% said Google and 10% said their “other/alternative” statistics tool.
75% of the sites had never done a tag audit. This is the biggest issue for us, as regular tag audits are essential if you want to ensure all your traffic is being monitored by Nielsen.

Events
I-COM Global Summit, Lisbon 2010

The OPA is a partner organization to I-COM, a global body and conference of the measurement community. Their next summit takes place from 10 - 13 March 2010, in Lisbon, Portugal. Past I-COM themes focused on connecting the silos, whether they be countries (Berlin ‘05) or media channels (Barcelona ‘08). Building on these ideas, top speakers like Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer will also connect the silos of Measurement Disciplines (Audience Measurement, Web Analytics, Consumer Insights, etc) and debate the future, vision and integration of Online Measurement. Click here to see the programme status.

Join the people already connected with us on the I-COM Global Summit event page.

Sounding off!

Wishing you all success in online publishing in 2010! I really enjoyed being an active part of the OPA this past year and am excited about the future of the organization and the sector in South Africa.

Josh Adler CEO,Prefix/OPA Head of Measurement

The answer is both Yes and No. Yes, you can request a special email tag from Nielsen to insert into your email HTML so you can get reporting on your emails within Site Census. You must also ask for a new channel to be setup for this so your reports make sense. Nielsen will assist you easily with this.

However! This additional traffic will NOT be counted for the Market Intelligence/OPA rankings, as Market Intelligence is about traffic on your website or mobile site only. It validates that the content being read is on the domain that you own - and an email on someone’s computer will not pass that test.

If you would like to setup this tracking for your own internal reporting and use within SiteCensus, please contact Nielsen support directly.

As an advice point, we recommend that you use a known bulk email provider / software solution to get email analytics that offer distinct insights and value. You can use web analytics to track the success / sources of your traffic online including your mailers.

As per my recent measurement update, the online survey tool is now live and you can begin to sbmit your data. We recommend that you download the PDF/Word versions of the survey below and collect your data first before coming to submit the survey online, as there is quite a lot to collect.

Instructions are within the survey documents.

Thanks! This is really going to be interesting, and the results will be of benefit to us all.

Submit your data to our online form

Download the survey in:  MS-Word or PDF
OPA Measurement Survey Questions
OPA Measurement Survey Questions

Remember, submission deadline is 15 August. It won’t take long, and is very much worth it.