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Marketers Demand Accountability From Online Publishers

Major marketers including Kimberly-Clark, Colgate-Palmolive, Ford Motor, Hewlett-Packard, Visa and PepsiCo are insisting that online publishers hire auditors to check their ad and viewer counts by the middle of next year. Other companies are concerned that so-called click fraud may be driving up their ad bills, so they are sharing their proprietary ad data with click-trackers, which try to figure out how prevalent such devious clicks are.

Ad agency executives said the issues must be resolved before large advertisers pour much more money online.

"The Internet has matured to a place where traditional marketers--companies that have been spending much more money on television and print--are asking the questions that they would ask for the print side," says Mainak Mazumdar, vice president of measurement science and product marketing at NetRatings.

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