• by Nina Lentini  @Nina_Lentini, April 19, 2007

As marketing officers the world around understand, measuring the effectiveness of brand communications is more art than science. That measurement took a step closer to the scientific world yesterday as leading market information company TNS announced an alliance with Integration, an international consultancy, to leverage the latter's flagship product, which seeks to establish a common currency for the marketing industry.

Market ContactAudit (MCA) measures the effectiveness of a brand's marketing communications from the consumers' perspective. It quantifies how successfully a brand engages with consumers by the degree to which consumers recall connecting with the brand through contacts (or "touch-points"), factored by the contacts' influence.

With a common metric currency or what Integration calls "brand experience points," MCA establishes a baseline from which to measure the contribution to sales from each communication channel and consumer touch-point.

Jeni Chapman, EVP/Advertising and Brand Performance at TNS, on her way home after the Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York yesterday, told "Marketing Daily" that Integration purposely used the term "audit" to describe its measurement tool because it audits what media companies are doing with their media dollars. TNS brings more to the party.

"By linking to what we do with what the brand idea is - the who, how and what - we can help clients take the 'how-to' and tie in with their brand idea," she said.

Chapman explains the concept as a quadrant that highlights penetration versus value. "If there's a lot of white space, we can link it to how to tie that in with a client's brand idea. We can pull out, was it the contact or execution that didn't work. On the other hand, it could be a very crowded space. Then we figure out what type of investment it would take to make that work." TNS, then, will leverage the MCA through surveys that calculate consumer clout factors at each contact point - adding quality to quantity. Integration has audited more than 11,000 brands among 250,000 consumers, across 240 categories, in 65 markets and 25 languages, said TNS in a news release.

Integration founder/CEO Oscar Jamhouri said in the release that TNS' support will help Integration find new MCA customers. "For existing customers, there are immediate opportunities to bring added value by combining MCA with TNS' innovative Brand & Advertising research solutions."

"One of the key challenges for marketers today is the proliferation of platforms and media fragmentation," said Chapman. "We see Market ContactAudit addressing this critical client need through truly holistic brand management."