Much has been written about the challenges facing mobile measurement. For example, the IAB's Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence (MMCoE) released an overview in early October. Somewhat less has been written about industry efforts to address those challenges, and so I would like to review briefly the IAB's game plan for improving one aspect of the nascent mobile measurement universe.

When any marketing attribution management solution is developed, a decision must be made right upfront on which available data is going to feed the attribution process. Obviously the mathematical science that's employed to calculate the amount of credit to be attributed to every channel, campaign and tactic used by marketers can only utilize the data that's made available. So if certain data within an organization is excluded and deemed unimportant -- such as the "non-converter" data in the example above, before that data has been mathematically proven to be unimportant -- then that solution is inherently suspect.

Targeted social listening: We use this technique to pinpoint how our media impacts social, and how social affects overall ROI. Measuring social media alongside other online channels is not new. What is new is the complex approach to uncover the delicate statistical relationships between paid media and online social conversations. There's a wealth of data in every social interaction, but it takes constant selective monitoring (social listening) and analysis to tease out real insights attributed to media which in turn may help inform future media planning, optimizations and creative.

On one consulting assignment, I got to learn a lot about the outdoor advertising business. One thing I learned was that the then-prevailing audience metric was the Daily Effective Circulation, or DEC. Now, see if any of this sounds familiar... the DEC was based on empirical site-centric traffic counts, but did not provide information at the persons level, and did not disentangle reach from frequency, and advertisers and agencies believed that these counts dramatically overstated actual audience delivery. I remember meeting with the leading out-of-home shops, and having media directors tell us that they routinely discounted the DEC metric by …

With Google's Q3 just behind us and a Hulu IPO on the horizon, it seems worthwhile to ask which one of these two companies will own the future of prime video inventory. That's still an open question; and of course, any number of third players could come and take the reins. But what's important to understand is that Hulu and YouTube represent not just an epic battle of networks, but a fundamental conundrum in digital media buying. And that conundrum is about metrics.

There's a lot of information out there. And the industry has done a remarkable job of providing "point solutions" that solve very specific data problems -- whether you're talking about DSPs for display, regionally specific media management technologies, or businesses that help advertisers dynamically generate audience-targeted creatives. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's very difficult to roll the data points together into a holistic view. That's why we're still stuck in a conundrum of last-click attribution that views display advertising in a vacuum. That's why global CMOs are almost universally frustrated over the difficulties of …