• by Joe Mandese , November 15, 2006

The official demise of a state-of-the-art advertising verification service late last week, has inspired two of its competitors to join hands in what has been a rapidly changing segment of the advertising marketplace. Teletrax, a unit of Medialink that uses digital "watermarking" technology to electronically track TV commercial and other forms of television content, and Mediaguide, which does the same for the radio industry, Monday announced plans to jointly market their services to advertisers, agencies and media content owners looking for a proof that there media content actually ran.

The push follows the demise of Confirmedia, a unit of Verance that also marketed electronic verification services, but which failed to counter the market momentum of its chief rival, Audio Audit. Audio Audit, which already had a leg up on Confirmedia, was acquired by Nielsen Media Research in June 2005, and is now part of a suite of monitoring and verification services offered by the TV ratings giant.

All of the companies appear to have overestimated the market for such services, believing that at a time of increasing media accountability, advertisers and agencies would pay significant sums for foolproof electronic verification. To date, most of the market demand has come from media content owners seeking to prove their delivery to Madison Avenue or to track the distribution or their own content or promotional announcements.

Early this year, Court TV even offered to provide Confirmedia' reports free to agencies and advertisers who purchased schedules on Court TV (MediaDailyNews Feb. 14). The offer was part of Court TV's push to provide greater accountability and ROI to its customers.

Historically, advertisers have relied on ad agencies to confirm that their TV and radio ad buys actually ran as part of their agencies' "post-buy" analyses of the media buys. Agencies have relied on a variety of methods, including commercial monitoring services such as TNS Media Intelligence, Nielsen's Monitor-Plus, and on spot checks with stations and networks. Agencies have also relied on station affidavits, believing they were reliable, because broadcast TV stations maintain rigorous controls as part of their broadcast licensing requirements with the Federal Communications Commission.

However, studies conducted by Audio Audit and Verance and others have revealed significant discrepancies between the electronic media schedules placed by ad agencies and the ones that were actually run by the media. In many cases, the discrepancies involved the wrong creative running at the wrong time. In some cases, the ads never ran.

In recent years, marketers have also begun hiring media auditing firms to evaluate the compliance of their media agencies and how good they are at verifying the delivery of their media buys.

"I would characterize the market as being in unprecedented flux right now," said Andy Nobbs, president of Teletrax, referring not simply to the shifting market among electronic verification services, but rapid changes in the electronic media marketplace, especially the migration of video programming and advertising to new digital platforms. All of those new platforms will require accurate means of verifying that ads actually ran, he said.