Microsoft And comScore Partner To Measure Brand Marketing

by Gavin O'Malley, Jul 30, 2009, 4:02 PM

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To help brand advertisers better measure and track their online ad campaigns, Microsoft on Thursday announced a collaboration with comScore to design a digital media-planning service. The Reach and Frequency Planner -- or RF Planner, for short -- was developed to help advertisers more easily determine and predict how consumers will respond to their digital ads.

The RF Planner uses a hybrid audience measurement method that combines Microsoft's ad-serving data with demographic information from comScore's panel. It will offer forecasted reach and frequency for online ad campaigns and comScore's post-buy reporting to show how closely the campaign performance tracked to the prediction.

"The perception that traditional branding metrics are not possible or meaningful for digital media is misguided," said Scott Howe, corporate vice president of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group at Microsoft. "We believe online advertising won't maximize its appeal to brand marketers until the basic metrics they've relied on for years are available in digital-media plans."

Microsoft and comScore argue that online advertisers have been hindered by the inability to measure digital ad campaigns with the same metrics used for offline campaigns. As a result, ad budgets for brand advertisers account for about two-thirds of the $186 billion U.S. ad market, while only 5% of those dollars are spent on Web advertising.

"Brand advertisers need the ability to evaluate reach and frequency by audience composition in ways that are actionable and accountable," said Gian Fulgoni, comScore co-founder and chairman. "This new hybrid approach to digital media planning offers the granular campaign-level analysis and streamlined planning capabilities upon which brand advertisers have long relied in the traditional media environment."

Microsoft said closed beta testing of the RF Planner will start immediately, with select unnamed advertisers participating.

This marks the second major deal this week related to Microsoft's online ad ambitions. On Wednesday, it announced a long-anticipated collaborative search deal with Yahoo.

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0 comments on "Microsoft And comScore Partner To Measure Brand Marketing ".

1. Kyleen Fishwick from BusinessWeek
   

   commented on: July 31, 2009 at 9:54 a.m.

   Dissappointing - I was hoping this partnership would measure actual campaign "outputs" = impact on brand metrics. Sounds like it's simply measuring inputs = reach and frequency.

   Unfortunately, until we can develop quicker campaign brand metric analysis both print advertising and online brand advertising will continue to feel around in the dark.

2. James Riley from Disney Online Studios
   

   commented on: August 2, 2009 at 9:48 p.m.

   Sorry, the industry stat of $186 Million must be incorrect.

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