• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 6, 2005

DoubleClick intends to unveil a report today examining three different methods of figuring out whether online ad campaigns reached their target demographics: data from comScore's panel; cookies put on users' machines by Nielsen//NetRatings; and a modeling approach. The report does not conclude which method of the three is most effective, nor does it provide any data on how closely the demographics of consumers exposed to ads matched the demographics the media planners hoped to target.

Rick Bruner, DoubleClick's director of research, said the point of the research was to let media buyers know that the tools exist to determine the demographics of consumers exposed to an ad campaign after it ran. The objective, he said, was to "both make traditional advertisers more comfortable with the Internet by bringing to it some of the traditional metrics of measuring media that are more common in broadcast and print, and to educate some of the people who've grown up in a purely Internet environment."

Without information about how the anticipated demographics compared with those actually delivered by the sites, the study is only a "first step" toward validating planning models, said Gerard Broussard, senior partner and director of media Analytics media at mOne New York, which worked with DoubleClick on the research. "The value of this is to help us develop, in the future, pre-planning models," he said.