• by Kate Kaye , December 11, 2002

Let’s get one thing straight: ABCi is still in business. However, the recent announcement by the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ interactive auditing arm to combine its offline and online media reports has kicked up a bit of dust, reminding some just how nascent the online ad industry really is, and how many aspects of it remain unsettled.

“ABC Interactive is still doing the same audits, using the same data and the same methodology, and the same auditors,” stresses ABC’s director of communications, Marybeth Meils. ABCi members (publishers, advertisers and ad agencies) have been moving towards greater integration of online and offline media and have found the need for integrated reports. ABCi will now offer its interactive audits of websites, email and ad delivery systems, search engines and Internet broadcasters to its members only, who each pay varying fees to access data reports.

“The reason for the recent change of approach is at the behest of our membership,” explains Miels, who adds, “The industry is in a position where it’s trying to decide what methodology works for them.”

Of course, that all depends on the objective. An ad serving firm that already tabulates endless lines of serving and tracking data may think a process audit, the kind that measures the internal mechanisms of its system, suffices. For instance, to ensure its system does what the company says it does, DoubleClick verifies it through a third party auditing firm each year. DoubleClick’s director of product management for publisher solutions, Scott Spencer, is “not sure that [the ABCi decision] really impacts the industry.” He adds, “DoubleClick had to make a critical choice between doing something media focused and software focused….Our customers need to be able to use these numbers to bill, to validate the numbers our system generates.”

Others believe that activity audits that measure what’s actually happening on a campaign-by-campaign basis are what the industry really needs. Opines Bill Matthews, VP of business development at Web log auditing and analysis company, I/PRO, “A process audit once a year doesn’t get to the heart of the issue which is whether the numbers are validated that are being generated from a site.”

Hashing out what should be audited is only the half of it. There is also the question of whom should be audited: the publishers, the advertisers, the ad serving firms, or maybe all of the above? Glenn J. Hansen, president and CEO of ABC competitor BPA International, sees a pre-buy and post-buy separation. The publisher, or media owner, requires a pre-buy marketing tool to support sales claims. The advertiser, on the other hand, could use a post-buy audit to validate the campaign activity reported by ad servers and other vendors. Although BPA offers post-buy evaluations, from what Hansen can tell, “Most advertisers are not willing to bear that cost.”

No matter who’s doing which type of audits, Greg Stuart, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) sees the crux of the situation as the lack of a “currency auditing” system, a third party audit that’s accepted industry-wide which can be employed by media buyers and sellers to validate buying and selling decisions.

“You have to have buyers demand it as well as publishers accept it,” comments Stuart. “Those are a lot of hoops to jump through.”