Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank reckons web publishers would better serve both themselves and brand advertisers by reducing the amount of inventory they give to ad networks.

Speaking at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0 conference last week, Burbank also said excessive inventory was diluting ad prices which in turn hurt online publishers.

Many online publishers are concerned that ad networks undermine the value of their offering, selling ads at pennies on the dollar.

For their part, ad networks say their targeting technology directs the right ads to the right audience at a lower cost.

John Burbank also said at the conference that publishers should give brands bigger and ‘better’ ad units and establish new metrics to measure the success of brand advertisements.

Direct-response metrics, such as impressions, click-throughs and search queries were inappropriate for evaluating brand advertisements, Burbank said.

Better metrics would track the ability of ads to reach the desired target markets and change the way consumers think about their brands, as well as help sell products.

These might include measurements of how long consumers spent with an ad, and how they interacted with it. Otherwise, Burbank suggested that offline metrics such as brand awareness and purchase intent could also be used.

While I see the relevance of new measures relating to time spent on an ad, and interactions with an ad, I’d be wary of using traditional offline measures. They may have some place in a holistic research approach, but surely the Internet delivers much more precise and informative measures than those used offline.

Source: Anna Maria Virzi, “Nielsen Online CEO Calls on Publishers to Cut Inventory,” ClickZ, June 24, 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Feature, Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.