• by David L. Smith , July 1, 2002

Last week I talked about the resurgence either happening or about to happen in the business. I do expect the summer to be fairly quiet but I am bullish about the fall. My point was that if we are going to ramp up (hopefully a little slower this time), we need to put a better infrastructure in place. That started with the signing of Ts & Cs as they are for the good of the business. This week, I will talk about some other infrastructure issues, which should help.

First, some housekeeping. There were many inquiries about the Ts & Cs (people wanting copies, etc.). Copies can be downloaded from both the IAB www.iab.net and the AAAA’s www.aaaa.org although the IAB copy is easier to find, being prominently featured on the home page.

Now on to some further issues:

There has been much discussion about Reach & Frequency as this initiative is gaining steam in many companies across the industry. At least two R/F systems are operable and ready to use today: The Web R/F system by NetRatings, which is up on IMS/Mediaplan, and the Atlas GRP and Reach Forecaster from Atlas DMT. It is important that agencies and sites try these systems and be vocal about their strengths and weaknesses to the vendors. Early systems such as these are not refined and will no doubt need many modifications to be ready for prime time this fall, not the least of which is the ARF recommended combination of SCM and UCM data. Neither of these offerings combines the two types of data in their systems at this time, although they both have plans. While we have not yet seen pricing on these systems, our hope is that they are scaleable and affordable to all sizes of companies. The practice of charging one flat fee for Web research needs to end. That, or the vendors will find that they have a limited number of large customers.

But we cannot stop there on R/F. A plan is only a theoretical goal. We must be able to track how R/F cumes for individual sites and across a campaign in real time against the planned demographic. Why? Because we want to and should be able to with current third party ad serving tools if they work with the survey companies.

Second, we need post analysis tools that permit us to have final R/F for the campaign within our demographic, shown as a percentage of the target audience exposed, with average frequency and frequency distribution available. It should also be possible to dissect this R/F and run it against other demos to determine key areas of over or underdelivery.

So, your task here is to push the third party ad servers to deliver these tools affordably in their default systems. They are getting closer. We need to be all the way there before September.

Atlas/DMT (Digital Marketing Suite) and DoubleClick (MediaVisor) both have automated RFP solutions. This is another area that planners and buyers need to work with to determine efficacy. Only through the market speaking up will good standards evolve. And this is clearly an area needing standardization.

What other productivity tools are available to simplify the next round of business? We’d like to know.