comScore is excited to announce the introduction of Ad Metrix Social, a significant new product enhancement that provides unique detail and insight into the social side of display advertising. The availability of this new social measurement module helps advertisers and agencies understand the importance of display ads appearing on social networking sites and socially-enabled display ads appearing across the web.

Why is understanding the social side of display advertising so important? Consider the following statistics on the U.S. social networking market:

• 1 out of every 6 minutes spent online is spent on a social networking site
• 1 out of every 3 display ads appears on a social networking site
• ½ of the total U.S. Internet audience visits a social networking site in a given day
• The average Internet user views more than 2,000 display ads on social networking sites each month

Socially-Published Display Ads
Right now, you may be asking “What are socially-published and socially-enabled display ads?” Socially-published display ads are ad units appearing on social networking sites, such as Facebook and Linkedin. While comScore Ad Metrix has always reported on the volume of display ads on these sites, the addition of enhanced reporting detail and functionality provides advertisers and agencies with a more comprehensive understanding of these advertisements. In the case of Facebook, which accounts for the preponderance of display ads in the category, most of its ad units are non-standard display ads based on an image and surrounding text, such as the examples below:

In addition, comScore’s Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) methodology provides Ad Metrix with a distinct advantage over competing services when it comes to accounting for socially-published display ads. Competing services, many of which rely on spiders to crawl the web for display ad collection, are unable to access all the content on sites like Facebook that require the user to log-in. Because Ad Metrix measures activity within the comScore panel with explicit permission from the panelists, it has visibility into ad exposures occurring within Facebook and other log-in sites.

Socially-Enabled Display Ads
Socially-enabled ads are a somewhat more recent development on the display ad landscape. These ads typically include an emblem or specific messaging directing the audience to engage with their brand on a social network (usually either Facebook or Twitter). Below are a few examples of display ads classified as socially-enabled ads.

Socially-enabled ads help increase the number of brand fans, which in turn increases the ability of brand marketers to directly reach their fans with relevant messages. But that’s not the only benefit, because comScore research through our Social Essentials service has shown that a brand’s communication to fans is amplified through the “friends of fans”, with this amplification occurring both in terms of additional reach and persuasion.

The Intersection of Social + Display = the Future of Digital Ad Campaigns
We are still in the very early phases of the integration of social media and display advertising. Historically, these marketing tactics have been relegated to their own silos, but savvy marketers are beginning to understand the synergy between the two. Social has evolved into an essential component of the modern marketing mix, and one of the most vital aspects of developing these relationships with consumers is by turning them into brand fans and followers. Socially-published and socially-enabled display ads are helping to forge this critical link.

Now is the time for brands to get serious about their social strategies or risk falling behind their competitors. Staying ahead of the curve requires the right competitive intelligence to understand the social side of display advertising, and Ad Metrix Social provides the actionable insights to do just that.

North American audiences interested in learning more about Ad Metrix Social can join comScore for a webinar on October 20th at 2PM ET. Please register by visiting: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/338258400.

In today’s frantic digital media environment (how many times have you heard, “I need it yesterday”?), we often get asked by media planners and sellers, “what’s the comp index?” or “what’s my comp index?” For those who may not be familiar with this term, “comp index” is industry slang for the Composition Index metric.

So what is this thing called Composition Index and why should I give a hoot? (Well, for one, because I’m writing about it, of course!) In its most basic form, Composition Index measures the concentration of a particular target group of consumers on a given website or ad network, compared to the concentration of that target in the total Internet population.

Let’s run through an example together. Oh come on, indulge me… this will be fun, I promise.

Let’s say that twitter.com/jefhack (wink, wink, that’s my Twitter profile) reaches ten people each month and five of these kind folks (or shall I say, “followers”) falls into your target audience. In industry speak, comScore computes a Percentage Composition of 50% (i.e. 5 out of 10) for that target. Now, let’s also say that for the U.S. Internet as a whole, there are 200 million visitors and 50 million of them fall into your target audience. The Total Internet Composition % is 25% (50 million out of 200 million).

To compute the Composition Index for visitors (remember that key piece, “for visitors”, because we’re coming back to that shortly), we divide 25% into 50%, giving us 2, and then multiply that result by 100. So, the Composition Index for the target audience among twitter.com/jefhack followers is 200. Wow, 200! As Steven Tyler would say from the American Idol judging seat, “that’s beautiful, just beautiful”.

But, is it beautiful? Well, yes and no. Oh sure, a 200 Composition Index can be a wonderfully beautiful thing if Steven Tyler says it is, and if it is truly measures what matters for the objective at hand. But what is the objective at hand here? Well typically, media planners and sellers are working together to match up an advertiser’s message with the right audience and the right content with the best combination of target reach and frequency.

So what’s my point? The exercise above assumed that the best way to measure Composition Index in the larger context of matching ads to consumers is to use visitors as the most atomic level of measurement. If this were a conversation about magazine readership or TV viewership, my ever-so-engaging style of writing would quickly come to a stop here. But don’t fret. I think you see where I’m headed… and this job isn’t quite finished.

After all, this is the world of digital media where every event can be measured, reported, and analyzed. Time and time again, we must ask ourselves if there is a better way to be looking at something. Are we analyzing the most meaningful metrics? In this case, there may be something better…

Nestled inside of the comScore Media Metrix planning suite are two reportable measures that go by the names of, % Composition Pages and Composition Index PV. Think of these as analogous to what we just described above, except that their atoms are the pages consumed by the target audience. Why does that matter? Why might this be a better metric in this instance? Because we’re trying to place ads in front of those consumers most likely to purchase a particular product.

Let’s get back to my Twitter profile one last time (I swear that this posting is not solely intended to drive up my number of “followers”). We learned above that five (or 50%) of my profile visitors fell into the target audience. But, what if we could learn that my page was viewed 20 times during that same period, and only five of those page views were seen by the target audience. Hmmm. 5 divided by 20 equals 25% Composition PV. Suddenly, my 50% composition of visitors just dwindled to 25% composition of pages.

Why should you care? Well, we know that ads are placed on pages (or in video streams, but we’ll save that discussion for another day). So, the chances of the target audience seeing the advertiser’s message is directly tied to the number of pages they consume. Therefore, 25% is the more relevant measure in this instance, since we’re interested in understanding exposure to advertising.

So now you ask… that all sounds like it makes sense, but can you prove it? I’m glad you asked, because we sure can.

I took the liberty of tapping into comScore’s Ad Metrix service to answer this final question. Ad Metrix is comScore’s leading competitive intelligence tool for understanding the display advertising market. With Ad Metrix, we can learn just how many ads were actually seen by the target audience and tie that back to both the visitor comps and page comps. Let’s take a look at how this plays out for the audience target of Females Age 25-54 for two sample web properties: Everyday Health and iVillage.

They say that the proof is in the pudding. (I should not be writing this piece before breakfast, clearly).

You’ll notice that for both properties, Females 25-54 make up approximately 40% of the unique audience. And if we just stopped at the % Comp measure for visitors (“UV”), you might assume that there is just a 4 in 10 chance of reaching the specified target with ads. But, if we take it a step further and look at the % Comp Pages measure, the odds improve to about 5 in 10. I’m not a big gambler (realized early on that losing wasn’t fun, especially on a college budget!), but even I know that this is not an insignificant change. Another way to look at it is that you can actually have a 20% greater efficiency (50% divided by 40%) in delivering ads against your desired target simply by looking at a better metric.

Now how can we be sure that this Pages-based measure matters more and is truly the better metric? Take a look at the last column in the table. Because of Ad Metrix, we can quantify exactly how many ads were seen by this target audience on each site (and isn’t that the whole point of this exercise in the end?). I’m also no fancy mathematician, but even a quick glance at the numbers will tell you that the pages comp and ads comp values line up pretty darn close… in fact, strikingly close. The proverbial pudding tells us that the theory of pages consumed indicates likelihood of seeing an ad is quite true.

So my message to media buyers and sellers: Take the extra time to think about whether or not you’re measuring what matters most. And if you’re not, maybe give this PV comp metric a try. It really works!

I hope you enjoyed this ride and will come back again. And oh by the way, my Twitter handle is @jefhack in case you missed that. :-)

Last week I spoke at the annual ARF Re:Think Conference on the topic of how to improve the monetization of display ads. It’s a common refrain in our industry that, despite the many virtues of the Internet, on a relative basis digital ad spending continues to lag other media. While consumers spend more than 20% of their media consumption time online, less than 10% of ad dollars are currently being allocated to the medium. If these numbers are ever to reach equilibrium, it will require continued diligence on the part of our industry to improve the strategy, creative, execution and evaluation of digital advertising so as to increase campaign performance and ROI.

To understand how the digital advertising industry can attract more dollars, it’s important to take a look at its history and evolution. Despite the many innovations that have occurred over the past decade, we are still experiencing the negative repercussions of some missteps from the early days. The following are four key issues that have inhibited the development of the medium to date, and why there’s reason to be quite optimistic about its future

#1 Ad Clutter

The Problem: Since the early days of the Internet as an advertising medium, banner ads have been emblazoned all over web pages wherever the site could squeeze them in. The conventional wisdom for publishers was simply that more ads equaled more dollars. Over time, the industry has learned that very often more ads per page equaled significantly less impact. Good advertising is about telling a story and by cluttering a web page with several competing messages, there is simply no way to effectively engage with the average consumer. Can you imagine if TV ads featured 4 or 5 different advertisers on the screen at the same time? That would never fly…

Reason for Hope: We’ve been observing the long term trends in ad clutter and we’re beginning to see these numbers decline, which suggests that advertisers and publishers may be beginning to realize that less can be more.

#2 Poor Creative Quality

The Problem: Historically, online creative has been the stepchild of its TV and print counterparts. With more condensed space and a lack of “site, sound and motion,” online ads have traditionally aimed to cram a lot of information into a few square inches of real estate. With such a limited palette, it’s no wonder that the best creative minds in advertising may have been reluctant to conquer this medium.

Reason for Hope: We are seeing a rapid evolution in the quality of online creative today, much of which can be attributed to technical advancements and better integration of the online and offline advertising teams. As broadband penetration continues to increase, sites are more willing to accept bandwidth-hungry, rich media units. We have also seen progress in the form of new creative formats developed by the Online Publishers Assocation, which provide significantly larger real estate for the message, as well as creative ways to deliver it (e.g. the fixed panel unit which remains constant as the user scrolls up or down). For anyone who caught last year’s iPhone takeover ad by Apple on The New York Times Web site homepage, you saw this creative revolution first-hand and it will only get more interesting and compelling with time. And, finally, we are seeing an explosion in the use of video ads, which deliver an ad message with all the richness of TV and which allow full creative expression.

#3 Poor Targeting

The Problem: Another issue that has inhibited effective digital advertising efforts is poor delivery against target consumer segments and inability to reach these consumers with the desired frequency. We’ve conducted numerous post-buy analyses of online ad campaign over the years and frequently find that less than a quarter of campaigns even reach their intended target. Below are several examples of actual campaigns we’ve evaluated illustrating how poorly many campaigns are at actually reaching their targets.

Reason for Hope: comScore research has shown that better controls for in-country delivery can positively impact the reach and efficiency of a campaign. I suspect that simply raising awareness of the need for this level of control will give us improved performance. And, new techniques for identifying target audiences continue to debut from a variety of players, including comScore’s Audience Advantage offering. The actual means of targeting an audience can vary dramatically, ranging from search behavior to cookies that reflect offline purchase activity, but the end remains the same. Media buyers and sellers are increasingly being equipped with the ability to improve delivery against their desired audiences.

#4 Wrong Metrics Used for Measuring Campaign Success

The Problem: Even though the pitfalls of using the click as a means of evaluating campaign success (especially branding campaigns) have been well-documented, many in the industry are still having a tough time breaking this addiction. Clicks are easy to measure, which of course makes it tempting to use them for evaluation of a campaign, even if clicks bear little relationship to the actual impact of the campaign on consumers. With click-through rates now averaging around 0.1%, any marketer who focuses on the click is essentially allowing one clicker to represent the branding impact made on the other 999 exposed consumers.

Reason for Hope: We here at comScore have had the opportunity to directly measure the effectiveness of online advertising on behalf of leading advertisers across a variety of industries with differing goals, ranging from branding lift to online behavior lift (keyword search, site visitation) to offline sales impact. These efforts have proved without a shadow of doubt that online advertising can help advertisers to extend the reach and efficiency of their marketing efforts, so as long as we measure what truly matters.

The good news is that the digital advertising industry has grown despite some of these early missteps. There is significant reason to believe that our industry is moving in the right direction in many ways. By focusing on effective strategy, creative, execution and evaluation, we are ready for digital advertising to fulfill its original promise. As we better demonstrate the value of digital campaigns, we can combat commoditization and boost demand, resulting in an increase in CPMs and a greater share of the overall advertising pie.

Based on the results of a study comScore released two weeks ago regarding the state of automotive online advertising, we know that the industry has continued with strong online marketing efforts for SUV models - even in the face of severe financial difficulties during the current economic downturn. Despite the financial headwinds of the moment, however, businesses still need to advertise and promote their brands and products if they hope to generate sales. Right now, cost-effective marketing is more important than ever, and that may be a key reason why the auto industry is increasingly moving its ad spend online.

In order to understand how automakers have taken to the online channel for marketing purposes, let’s take the example of one of the larger model-specific campaigns that ran in January: GMC Yukon. Using comScore Ad Metrix, our competitive display advertising intelligence service, we learned that the Yukon went to market with an online media strategy that delivered ad impressions across a broad set of site categories and achieved a commanding 34% share of voice versus its SUV competitors, with the campaign reaching 4.4% of the total U.S. Internet population an average of 2.7 times per person in just one month.

January 2009, Total Campaign Levels:

In addition to examining total plan levels, I returned to Ad Metrix to compare the Yukon advertising strategy to that of the overall SUV category. Was there something else at play here that could both contribute to an interesting blog post, as well as lend insight to help other marketers? You betcha. The data showed that Yukon executed a plan that was concentrated in different site categories than its SUV competitors. For example, Yukon allocated more than one-half of its impressions to the News/Information category, while only 20% of SUV ads ran in the same category. Consequently, Yukon achieved an impressive 78% share of voice (SOV) in the category, enabling it to stand out among its competitors. Let me repeat that… a 78% share of voice! Below is a view of the top 10 site categories in which Yukon advertised compared to those of SUV advertisers in total.

January 2009, GMC Yukon SOV by Site Category:

Clearly, the ad placement strategy of Yukon differed greatly from that of its competitors, so I then decided to look at the Yukon campaign in more detail. As a former media planner, I regularly checked total audience delivery numbers in combination with targeting data to best understand the value of the consumers reached. So, I used Plan Metrix, comScore’s leading lifestyle and product consumption service, to conduct an in-depth analysis for the Yukon campaign. The Plan Metrix data revealed that Yukon placed display ads across site categories that delivered a high reach of SUV owners (e.g. News/Information sites can reach 78% of SUV owners), as well as categories that delivered a highly concentrated audience of SUV owners (e.g. Real Estate sites are 55% more likely than the average site category to deliver SUV owners). This type of media strategy is common advertising practice within any medium, and helps to ensure a sufficient reach of the target along with deeper engagement of those consumers most likely to make a purchase in the product category.

January 2009 Site Category Delivery of SUV Owners:

Aside from smart media planning tactics, the Yukon campaign also employed a unique creative message that its competitors could not match. Yukon is the recipient of the 2009 Consumer Guide Best Buy Award. In addition to providing competitive advertising data, comScore Ad Metrix allows media planners to visually analyze a campaign by viewing the actual creative executions. The analysis of Yukon’s creative revealed an emphasis on its 2009 Consumer Guide Best Buy Award, a message that was apparent in more than two-thirds of its ad placements. At a time when there is much debate about the overall quality of autos being produced, this is a particularly strong message.

The Yukon creative and media strategies reveal a campaign that is highly differentiated from those of its competitors. And, it certainly appears to have the elements of a very effective strategy.

Successful advertisers are always seeking to outsmart the competition, and that can best be achieved through a strong creative execution in tandem with an effective media placement. In this case, the Yukon campaign accomplished both with its Consumer Best Buy messaging and ad placement that focused on site categories that are under-utilized by its competitors. (Incidentally, one potential ancillary benefit of this latter strategy is achieving a more cost-effective campaign by steering clear of the placement of competitive ads, which can drive up CPMs. This is clearly a significant benefit, and may have played a role in the media planning process.)

But, to really confirm whether a campaign was effective or not requires a deeper layer of analysis. To gauge the actual impact of the online ad exposures, an advertiser or media planner might want to conduct a post-buy analysis to answer key ad effectiveness questions, such as:

• What was the view-through rate of the ads?
• Did brand awareness of the Yukon increase? If so, by how much?
• What was the consumer recall of the brand? Of the ad?
• Did the ad-exposed consumers become buyers?
• Did Yukon sales increase?

Beyond the auto industry, and the specific Yukon example, marketers generally turn to online advertising for its cost-effectiveness, flexibility, accountability, and appeal to consumers. On a final note, a key contributing factor to online marketing success is choosing the right data partner to help you address important media planning issues. You can guess who my choice would be!