• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 10, 2009

At a time when it might seem more important than ever for advertisers and their agencies to know whether their ads are running correctly, if at all, the discussion surrounding electronic ad verification appears to have taken a back seat on Madison Avenue. Havas media shop MPG is hoping to change that. In a switch, the agency is conducting a comprehensive test of two of the ad industry's leading providers of electronic verification systems - Nielsen and Eloda - and will open the results for the entire industry to see.

The test, which is being conducted as part of MPG's so-called Collaborative Alliance meetings and initiatives, is currently in the field, and is evaluating the performance of an actual national TV buy - on both broadcast and cable networks - for MPG client Reckitt-Benckiser's Air Wick brand. The goal is to find out whether the ad industry can use the new, state-of-the-art tracking systems to find out when their TV spots run incorrectly, or not at all, and to see if they can accelerate the time it takes to reconcile such discrepancies and adjust their media buys and budgets in real time.

Such discrepancies have long been a vexing problem for advertisers and agencies. In addition to requiring ample manpower to track, verify and negotiate makegoods surrounding discrepant media buys, the process historically has caused many clients and brands to miss out on a portion of their advertising weight during periods they were originally planned to run.

Early in this decade, there was a push by an earlier generation of electronic verification services to convince advertisers and agencies to integrate digital tracking technologies into their process, but one of them, Verance, went out of business, and another, Audio Audit, was acquired by Nielsen Co. Audio Audit was ultimately integrated into KeepingTrac, a new Nielsen product that has been winning favor with some big advertisers and agencies, including WPP's GroupM unit.

Even so, MPG COO Steve Lanzano says the discussion surrounding electronic verification seems to have "fallen by the wayside," and he asked to conduct a high-profile, open test of the systems in order to draw industry attention to them, and to learn how they affect, and can improve the process for MPG and its clients.

"Are our spots running, and if they're not running, how quickly can we find out they're not running, and how quickly can we react about them not running," he says, adding that that those questions will become doubly important as the industry moves from conventional, linear TV advertising to interactive, and addressable TV advertising, where the number of discrete TV commercials and the types of audiences they are aimed at will expand exponentially, and with them, the prospect of increased discrepancies.

"It's going to get even more critical when we start doing interactive advertising and we're scheduling 70 different messages to 10,000 people. We need to make sure we're sending the right messages to the right people at the right time, and making sure they get them," Lanzano noted.

It was such thinking, he said, that led to the six-week, side-by-side test of Nielsen and Eloda, and the process doesn't simply begin and end with their tracking reports. The test is designed to find out whether those systems can be integrated into the broader media processing systems used by agencies to manage their media buys.

To do that, the new systems integrate directly into back-office media processing systems such as those operated by Donovan Data Systems, and pull agency and brand buying specifications directly from their original media plans, and then match the commercial units they verify to those specs, providing instantaneous reports to agency media buyers so that they can reconcile any discrepancies in real time, not days, weeks, or even months later.

"We installed the software [for the MPG test] last Thursday, and things look like they're running well," said Kevin Svenningsen, and senior vice president-media tracking services at Nielsen. While he said it was too soon to disclose any of the findings, he said "there's always something interesting to learn" from the process. And it's not simply whether commercials didn't run, but whether the right commercials ran, and whether they ran in the type of TV programming they were planned for. That's especially important for marketers and brands that have critical programming sensitivities, such as beer or alcohol marketers who are prohibited from advertising in shows that have a significant number of underage viewers.

The next phase of ad verification systems, said Eloda's John Gee, is to introduce competitive analysis reports and alerts so that agencies and brands can see where their spots aired during commercial breaks, whether they were in the most desirable "pod positions," and whether they were adjacent to key competitors.

"The thing that has changed is the need. I think the need is greater now than it was before," Gee said, referring to the relative lack of market acceptance surrounding the earlier generation of ad verification systems. "The technology and the demand for transparency is greater now, and the marketplace is more able to support this."