• Hunting The Wild Web Analyst: Rent, Buy Or Build?
    If you're looking to hire a Web analyst in the next few months, you might want to get started now. They are few and far between, and requisitions are staying open for months on end.
  • Smartphone Traffic And Device Penetration Close To Critical Mass
    On the advent of the launch of new phones supporting Google's Android, I thought it would be a good time to put a stake in the ground on the current smartphone data. AdMob, one of the largest mobile ad networks in the U.S. featured smartphone traffic data on a timely basis last week for its August Mobile Metrics report.
  • Las Vegas Or Park City?
    I attended the Social Ad Summit this week in the heart of Tribeca where an excellent question was raised by Seth Goldstein: "Where will we be meeting in five years? Will we be in Vegas or in Park City?" I love both cities and they are both great venues -- but the first one caters to a larger audience, the second to a smaller. The question got at the heart of the matter on defining how to measure social media. The cost-per-click model unlocked search and turned pay-per-click into a multibillion dollar business that scaled - so how can we …
  • Valuation And Evaluation
    An interesting column in the August issue of Media magazine by Mediavest's Yaakov Kimelfeld referred to reach and frequency as "totems of the television age," an incomplete set of measures for describing the way an ad campaign works....
  • Social Media - Maybe I Just Don't 'Get It'
    I recently saw an article in an e-newsletter I get where three "experts" from large and well-known tech companies shared their opinions about the best ways to measure the ROI of social media investments. The question they were asked was: "Have you been able to measure or track any tangible outcomes from your social media initiatives?"
  • Sarah Palin: Chevy Camaro or Edsel?
    The lead article in this week's Ad Age was "GOP gets its red sports car," in which a brand expert opined that if Senator McCain is a Ford F-150 and Senator Obama is a Prius, Governor Palin must be a Red Camaro. That well may be. And while trying to be neutral politically (at least for this column, he says while writing about politics), the danger is that she may be a Ford Edsel.
  • The Metrics Maze - Am I Lost?
    If you don't aim at anything, chances are, you will hit nothing. Measuring the effectiveness of marketing and advertising is tricky business. There are a slew of complex issues including cross media, viewthrough, sequence of exposure and so on. And while a handful of companies can afford the luxury of such sophisticated analysis on their campaigns, most are still trying to get the basics of measurement right. And it is the very basics of measurement on which sound media and marketing plans are built.
  • Spanning The Globe
    A New York-area sportscaster used to do a monthly clips feature under the name of "Spanning the Globe," so with apologies to Len Berman, I'm nicking the title for this column. Today is my first day back from vacation, and thus I'm pleased to report I have managed not to think too deeply about any one business issue over the past week or so... but of course, one's love affair with online metrics being what it is, I've thought a little about a couple of topics.
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