• by Masha Geller , March 26, 2002

Just last week, MediaPost’s newest columnist Tim McHale wrote about the necessity of applying the traditional media concepts of Reach and Frequency to online advertising. Today in New York, the ARF Online Reach and Frequency Committee held a meeting about that very issue and attempted to answer a question that has plagued the industry for the last 7 years.

The question was: to build online R&F curves, do we use data collected through User-Centric Measurement or Site-Centric Measurement?

The ARF meeting wasn’t open to the press, but we were lucky enough to have someone on the inside – Committee Chair and longtime MediaPost contributor David Smith, who just called us to say the results of the meeting are a giant leap in the right direction because the answer is “both.”

According to David, after asking representatives from companies like Jupiter Media Metrix, Atlas DMT, comScore, DoubleClick and several others to demonstrate their solutions to the R&F problem, the committee unanimously agreed that the standard of reach and frequency for the web should be a combination of site-side and server-side measurement. “The reality is that media planners combine metrics all the time” in traditional media, he said, and there is no reason that can’t happen online as well.

David said the meeting produced enough insight for the committee to issue a list of Best Practices and a white paper in the upcoming weeks. We’ll keep you posted on their progress and official results.