The holiday movie hype is upon us. With the importance of movies as an advertiser category, and with entertainment accounting for $729 million in revenues in the 2012 half-year IAB Internet Advertising Revenue report, the IAB thought it fitting to get a picture of how consumers use digital media to find out about movies and decide what to see.

When planning the implementation of an attribution solution within your organization, there are numerous decisions that will affect the length of time required to complete that implementation and begin benefiting from the insights and recommendations driven by your solution.

While digital advertising continues to accelerate and evolve, there's no doubt that TV retains its ability to reach large numbers of people over short periods of time. But the explosive growth of online advertising is offering marketers and media buyers other opportunities to reach, engage and influence specific audiences, with a calculated frequency and via more touch points. Irrespective of media, there is always a need for (new) measured metrics and standards that can help inform future campaigns and help better allocate marketing spending to most effectively reach and engage audiences.

Mobile devices present an opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers anywhere in the world at any time. While marketers can sense the impact of the mobile revolution, there's no scientific evidence to indicate whether mobile advertising drives conversions -- and if so, how?

Since the ANA, IAB and 4A's launched Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS), a great deal of progress has been made, specifically in moving digital measurement from a "served" to "viewable" impression standard. The Media Rating Council (MRC), is helming the shift from served to viewable ad impressions for online advertising transactions. On Nov. 14, the MRC issued its first Viewable Impression Advisory. The document and the efforts behind it are a monumental achievement in the history of media currency development and change.

Today's CMO occupies a challenging and dynamic place in his or her organization's ecosystem. He is accountable to the CEO for producing results - whether these results are leads, sales, brand equity or a combination - that help achieve the company's business goals. He partners with the CRO (chief revenue officer) to implement programs that fuel the sales organization's pipeline and empower it to close business. He is accountable to the CFO for producing those results at an acceptable cost, and must justify future budget spending based on past and predicted performance. And he manages a team that's responsible for …

You are building an ad campaign. You've completed vast amounts of research, worked hard on the creative, media plan and set your goals. Now it's time to figure out frequency -- how many times a person should see each ad. This task is extremely important. If your ad gets either too many or too few views, the whole campaign can derail. And once you've set the frequency, what is the actual probability of meeting it? Most premium publishers and ad exchanges claim they'll help advertisers achieve the perfect frequency target, by ensuring that the average frequency meets a set frequency …

A question that frequently arises when brands or agencies consider an investment in a marketing attribution solution is how to calculate the return on that investment. Of course, advertisers also tend to realize many incalculable benefits once they implement attribution, including (but not limited to) a stronger faith in the accuracy of their overall measurement practice, a third party accountability layer to evaluate all media partners, and installing the cornerstone of a fully data-driven marketing practice, but fiscal decisions do often require fiscal answers.

Every election year, the topic of dirty attack ads comes up. Pundits chastise candidates about the advertisements and everyone agrees that politics would be better if candidates focused on positive messages. Yet negative political ads live on despite the finger-wagging. Why? Because campaigns have looked at the history of attack ads and carefully monitored their results using very sophisticated approaches. And the data shows they work. Trying to figure out which ads are most effective is not just a goal of political candidates but of marketers as well. But whether marketers are measuring the wrong things or not considering enough …

Most online marketers now embrace behavioral-based targeting. As more and more marketers focused their online budgets to target based on behavior, the price for specific behaviors became more and more expensive. Automakers began paying top dollar for any user who visited an automotive site; they paid even higher premiums if users visited multiple sites on several occasions. The truth is that a lot of these tracked users are well underway to engage with the brand and are likely to convert anyway -- in short, they'll buy no matter what. If that's the case, then marketers focused exclusively on behavioral targeting …