• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, August 31, 2016

Six years and over 1,000 terms after its original release, CIMM’s media measurement industry Lexicon has been updated, with a new version called Lexicon 3.0.

The CIMM Lexicon, first introduced in 2010, collected all terms and definitions for return-path data  media measurement. Two years later in 2012, it expanded to include terms for cross-platform, dynamic advertising, connected TV, iTV and automatic content recognition. But the media world has evolved so dramatically and so rapidly with new technology, IoT, digitization, virtual and augmented reality and programmatic, that the expansion of the media vocabulary required a further update in 2016.

“The challenge of updating the Lexicon has grown vastly more difficult since 2010,” says Jane Clarke, managing director and CEO of CIMM. “Even as this Lexicon was being updated, new terms and definitions were emerging almost daily. But with this rapid change, the need for having a common language that we can all align on and understand is even more essential to the continued evolution of cross-platform media measurement.”

As before in previous versions, the updated CIMM Lexicon 3.0 remains true to its original purpose of creating a common language, even as that language expands. “This is not a final document but a work in progress that will be continually updated,” states Clarke.

Terms like brogrammer (portmantdeau of bro and programmer that’s a satirical, slang term for a male programmer in a fraternity-like milieu); blockchain (a critical part of the bitcoin peer-to-peer payment system); and romance scam (a form of Internet scam where thieves use online services to pretend to be romantic companions) have even become part of the language of the culture at large.

Other terms are fairly media-centric, like daisy chain (a programmatic term for the linking of ad networks to ensure an ad will be served to optimize revenues); digibabble (erroneously treating anything digital as a magical marketing tool); and script kiddie (an unskilled individual who uses scripts or programs developed by others to attack systems or deface sites).

"It's ironic that digital technology should have streamlined media measurement and have created a common language for cross-platform analytics, but [has also]  created a whole new, inconsistent and ever-changing vocabulary and a measurement Tower of Babel," says Jonathan Steuer, chief research officer at Omnicom Media Group. "Until we one day reach that communication and measurement nirvana, the CIMM Lexicon serves as an interim Rosetta Stone to help sort it all out."

Interested in expanding your media vocabulary? A full of copy of CIMM’s Lexicon 3.0 can be downloaded at http://cimm-us.org/cimm-whitepaper/.

Disclosure: The author of this article compiled and edited all three versions of the CIMM Lexicon.