• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 31, 2009

That’s right, Andy Fisher, VP Analytics & National Lead, Razorfish, things it’s a good thing, not a bad thing, that the online audience measurement business is currently in a state of chaos with a torrent of data sources to choose from, many of which are conflicting.

“We’ve been demanding this for about a decade now,” Fisher told OMMA M&M attendees in San Francisco this morning during the “Analytics Food Chain” panel. In addition to panel data, site census data, server data, hybrid audience measurement models, etc., Fisher cited data from social media, online ad exchanges, publishers’ proprietary data streams, client proprietary data streams, offline data, meta data, and much, much more.

“You have all this information, literally hundreds and hundreds of sources, and they all don’t agree. And in my opinion that is a wonderful thing,” Fisher asserted, painting the “multiple data sources in a chaotic world” as a utopian scenario for advertisers and agencies.

“I claim that chaos is fundamentally good, and that it’s good for the industry, and I claim that this is where the industry is going,” he said, adding, “It’s about building the right system for the advertiser’s business and using it to drive competitive advantage.”

While fellow panelist, Bob Page, Senior Director, Yahoo! Analytics, challenged that it could be an arbitrary process in which people simply chose the data sets that paint the best picture â€" not necessarily the most accurate one, Fisher said that’s no problem for smart agency strategists.

“At the end of the day, we’re trying to discern what drives value for our advertisers,” he said. “As an agency, representing an advertiser, it’s our job to pick what data proves a point.”