ComScore, the global leader in measuring the digital world, will along with Google be telling NBC and its advertisers how and where viewers across the globe will be watching the forthcoming London Olympics.

Mr Gian M. Fulgoni, Chairman and co-founder of comScore, which posted revenues of over $200 million in the last 12 months, described how the next big thing in measuring advertising effectiveness is going to be a "three screen measurement".

Next big opportunity

Cross media measurement is the next big opportunity for us as advertisers want to know how these different screens are being used to consume content, he said.

One of the first cross media measurement experiment is going to be seen at the London Olympics he said. "We, Comscore and Google, have just got a big contract from NBC to measure how people are going to be watching the Olympics across multiple screens. This is going to be very big, on a global scale," he told Business Line on the sidelines of Adtech, the big digital marketing summit going on in Gurgaon.

"If I am watching an event on my mobile and a little later on TV then the advertiser wants to know that I am the same person and not two different people," he says, pointing out the experiment during the Olympics will tell the advertiser exactly this piece of data.

Database match

So how will they do it? "We will do a database match with our partner companies that do television measurement and mobile video measurement. Let's say that Vikram Sharma is on our data base and he is also on the data base on the partner company guaging televsion consumption and on mobile too. We match the databases."

comScore, he says, has access to AT&T's mobile video measurement solution UVerse.

Is it the end of guesswork?

"Can you imagine the rate at which consumption on these devices is exploding," he exclaims. "Google activates in a day 750,000 Android devices - in a day, mind you. On December 25 and 26, they activated 3.75 million devices in two days. So you can imagine what a challenge it is for us to measure all of this."

So is this the end of guesswork in advertising - the famous saying in marketing used to be that only 50 per cent of advertising hit the target, rest was wasted.

"It was a good saying," responds Mr Fulgoni. "In India, only two out of every thousand campaign is clicked on. And yet, the click rate is used as a measure here because it is cheap, simple and fast. But it is not accurate. What instead is a more accurate measure is people's behaviour and we can do that through our panel," he says.

comScore entered India two years ago, but according to Mr Fulgoni, is already the biggest growth country for the measurement company. "It's ahead even of China," he says.

The online advertising market here is growing at 40 per cent annually he says, and with Internet penetration rate growing at 13 per cent, it''s going to be an exciting market for the company - nascent though still the digital marketing environment here still is.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW