Minorities 'ignored' by Comscore and Nielsen

At last. The online media industry, after years of grumbling that their audiences aren't being properly recognized, has finally called out Comscore and Nielsen. In a broadside obtained by Valleywag, and reprinted below, the head of the Interactive Advertising Board accuses the two audience research companies of "ignoring" diverse groups such as college students, ethnic minorities and out-of-home moms. The controversy matters enormously to internet media companies, because marketers such as Procter & Gamble rely on panel data — which are like opinion polls — to determine how much to spend on internet advertising, and with which sites. The muscular letter, signed by the IAB's Randall Rothenberg, represents a demand by the internet media industry for its fair share of recognition, and advertising dollars. These panels — thousands of internet users whose surfing patterns are monitored — tend to be light on representatives of student audiences, or Mac users, for instance. Comscore tried to see off the growing criticism of its practices, last week, by showing how sites' internal server logs could give an overly rosy view of their popularity. Not good enough. Read on, for the text of Rothenberg's protest.

On behalf of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, I would like to invite you to a summit meeting with the IAB's Board of Directors on interactive audience measurement. We haven't scheduled this meeting; we are willing to hold it at any time and any place that is convenient for you both. But we would like to convene it as soon as possible, because the matter is urgent: the ability of digital media - which is to say all media - to achieve our customers' goal of true accountability.

At this summit - if not before — we are seeking your agreement to a near-term timetable for independent audits and accreditations of your companies' interactive-audience measurement processes. We also hope to open a dialogue with you about assuring the integrity of audience measurement systems and processes as interactive technologies continue to evolve.

Imagine my surprise when I came to the IAB and discovered that the main audience measurement companies are still relying on panels - a media-measurement technique invented for the radio industry exactly seven decades ago- to quantify the Internet.

As the son of a lifelong researcher (a former head of the New York chapter of the American Marketing Association), I am sophisticated enough to know that panel methodologies will remain important. Still, it is incumbent on all of us in the marketing-media value chain to come as close as we can to the ideal of true accountability. To continue to close the gap between sample and census requires dialogue, collaboration, and auditing according to a set of independent, transparent standards.

The era of mass media (and mass-media measurement methodologies) excluded populations that appeared too difficult to reach, or too cost-ineffective for main media to count hence, the battles that have waged for years between media and research companies over the dilemma of counting college students, men in bars, out-of-home Mom's, ethnic minorities, or adults at work. The glory of interactive media is they make it easy to assemble, count, and assess the marketing value of these and myriad other niche populations - and aggregate these niche populations into effective and efficient media plans.

To persist in using panels that undercount or ignore the diverse populations that are the future of consumer marketing is to deny marketers the insights they need to build their businesses. And we have every reason to believe they are being undercounted or disregarded, for our members' server logs continue to diverge starkly from your companies' sample-based assessments, by 2x to 3x magnitudes in some cases - far beyond any legitimate margin of sampling error.

We in the marketing-media ecosystem have spent too many years trying to clean up the residue of flawed media-research methodologies. We simply cannot let the Internet, the most accountable medium ever invented, fall into the same bad customs that have hindered older media and angered advertisers for decades - customs such as inadequate samples, accepted out of begrudging convenience; or phantom metrics, like "pass-along readers," that add shadowy bulk to audiences that cannot be measured directly; or metering technologies and processes that are easy to game.

[From a letter sent by Randall Rothenberg, incoming chief executive of the Internet Advertising Board, the main lobby for the online media industry, which, among other things, sets standard ad sizes. The letter — which was sent yesterday to Magid Abraham of Comscore, and William Pulver of Nielsen Netratings — marks a significant escalation in the internet industry's lobbying for advertising market.]

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