Think Multicultural

A week or two ago in the Washington Post there was an article by Josh Chasin, the Chief Research Officer of comScore. The article was describing the challenges faced by marketers in measuring consumers’ consumption of the Internet, and more importantly, Internet advertising.

The article lists the usual suspects as threats to online ad measurement: Ajax, multitasking, rich media, etc. and says that comScore is working on better ways to measure user “engagement” with online advertising.

What it doesn’t list is the threat to comScore’s business model posed by the backlash from websites who say that comScore and Nielsen (the other major online advertising measurement service) do a terrible job of measuring even such basic things as online visitors and pageviews, much less such esoteric things as “engagement.”

As described a little in Mr. Chasin’s column, comScore is moving toward engagement metrics and away from basic metrics such as pageviews and unique visitors. Without actually being an engineer at comScore, it seems that this will rely on extrapolating the online web surfing behavior of a few users to the entire Internet audience, in a similar way to how Nielsen measures TV and Arbitron measures radio.

This begs the question – why? Isn’t the advantage of online advertising that every single action and interaction can be measured? Why then take a new technology that improves greatly on the old ways of doing things and try to shoe-horn it back into the old methods of measurement?

Someday soon, some startup in New York or Silicon Valley is going to figure out an accurate way to measure all web users’ interaction with web content and advertising without violating their privacy. When they do, the existing players are doomed.

There’s an interesting short article over at TV Week about Linda Bocage, who is a VP and Multicultural Investment Director for GM Planworks.

GM Planworks [link omitted due to super extra annoying website] is the division of Starcom MediaVest that does all of GM’s media planning and buying, including in multicultural markets.

Despite Bill Gates’ investment, PlanetOut continues to have problems.

According to news reports, PlanetOut has retained Allen & Company to assist in the exploration of strategic alternatives, including a possible sale of the company.

I continue to believe that the Gay & Lesbian media and advertising market continues to be an excellent market in the long run. In fact, if PlanetOut finds the right acquirers for its properties, it could make them stronger. If not, there will be opportunities to fill the holes left by the 800 pound gorilla in this market.