Media Auditor Set To Unveil New Market 'Currencies'

Asserting that the "gap" has never been wider between the conventional media audience measurements used by media planners and buyers and the and the metrics that are actually used by marketers to manage their businesses, an influential media auditing firm Wednesday unveiled it has launched a "global initiative" to develop new media marketplace "currencies" tied to consumer behavior, ad awareness, brand vitality and even sales and profits.

"They're the kinds of things I always tried to do on the agency side, but which just never seemed like the right thing to do," said Andrew Green, a former top media agency research chief, who is heading the new initiative for Media Performance Monitor America, the fledgling U.S. media auditing firm launched by the U.K.'s Billetts Group, with backing from consultant Erwin Ephron and media cost researcher SQAD.

Green, who was global research chief at OMD before joining Billetts, is heading Billetts Connection, a new division charged with developing proprietary research and systems that tie media buys to marketing results.

advertisement

advertisement

Green said the initial efforts will focus on three areas, all of which are currently being "piloted" in the U.K. and which will be exported to the U.S. soon: systems that tie the results of TV commercials to their position in commercial pods; the affect of program environment on ad effectiveness; and the correlation of media schedules with empirical customer databases.

Green said it was premature to reveal details of these projects, but the commercial pod positioning data promises to have a profound impact on the U.S. television marketplace, where big media shops have been struggling to develop TV commercial ratings systems to negotiate better deals with the networks.

"Right now the buyer buys a program and the commercials are rotated," said Green, "but each pod performs differently and each position in a pod performs differently."

Other companies in the burgeoning field of media auditing and performance monitoring are believed to be developing similar metrics and systems.

Next story loading loading..