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On Thursday I attended the second AdMonsters Operations Leadership Forum at Café Royal on Regent Street. Admonsters brings together the publishers and agencies involved in online advertising production & operations.  Discussion and debate focuses on the issues affecting the global industry and ad trafficking processes. Attendees included members from the IAB and ABC Electronic, publishers like FT.com, CondeNast, Sky TV, MySpace and Yahoo!, agencies like Mindshare and Zed Media plus vendors / sponsors Doubleclick and Mediaplex. The biggest issues discussed at this event included streaming video standards and website auditing and demographic analysis.

Streaming Video
The IAB have yet to formalise standards for video advertising online. It is widely accepted that the 15 and 30 second formats that have emerged could well be set in stone, as could the 4:3 or 16:9 display ratios. There was some concern among the AdMonsters members that advertisers need to consider the medium of the Internet before deciding to just run that same old TV commercial online. Audience attention is much harder to maintain on the Web, campaigns should be planned exclusively for the Internet with an audience and goal in mind. Advertisers have the means to follow up on their messages by driving audience interaction, quite different to television.

Audience Profiling
Panel based auditing tools from Nielsen Netratings and comScore are causing concerns among some publishers because they often portray an inaccurate audience profile. These tools extrapolate data from individual panelists by monitoring their browsing behaviour and matching the information to the known demographics about these individuals. The problem comes when the majority of panelists are at home, if your website has a large usage base from those at work or at university the data can be largely inaccurate. NewScientist.com for example, has so few panelists visiting in Nielsen’s system that the site appears to be of little popularity and the minimal data in existence is skewed by the 10 or so people that did visit.

The alternative to this method of profiling a website for media buyers is the use of on-screen survey pop-ups by the publishers themselves - audited by an analytics firm such as Forrester. Apparently this too isn’t ideal because the type of people that complete such surveys are self-selecting and not an accurate cross-site section of a website’s audience. However, agency staff in the room did agree that they took such data on board when planning their client’s campaigns, providing that the results and methodology are presented in a transparent way for closer scrutiny.

Technorati Tags: admonsters, ad ops, online advertising

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