IAB's New Measurement Guidelines Are Trapped in a Time Warp

After months of work, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today published a series of measurement guidelines, MediaPost reports. A quick look at the PDF reveals a clear set of guidance on how to think about audience reach either through uniques (cookies, browsers, devices and users), vists, video views and/or time spent. Anyone can comment on the guidelines here until January 20.

The good news is that page views - a dead metric - are barely mentioned at all in the 35 page document (PDF). The bad news is that the guidelines are trapped in a time warp and do not adequately provide marketers or the industry the standards we so desperately need to stack programs up against each other. Future proof they are not.

I have long been a proponent for standards, particularly when it comes to how we measure the impact of digital and social media programs. After all, if I said to you Yao Ming is "tall" you would know what I meant. Now on the other hand if I said the YouTube program we ran was "successful," would you know what that means? No. And that's because there's a 50 ways to measure a program and across several different vectors: reach, engagement, repuation and purchase/trial.

Now of course, the reach metrics that the IAB task force covers in this document are certainly one key vector for measuring programs. However, they do not nearly go far enough. They're beholden to an era when the reach dinos ruled the online landscape. They don't any more. It's a new era.

To be truly useful, the IAB needs to step it up in conjunction with its partners and not only offer guidance around reach but also other measures. They should span to include engagement, reputation/sentiment and, ultimately, stronger links to sales. Otherwise, I fear this effort is creating an outdated set of measures that are truly set in a bygone era when just a small number of sites ruled the roost. They're not the right system for a web as fragmented as the one we live in today.

Hopefully they will take another pass at the process and think broader. Reach is a good starting point but we need more. The IAB may need to branch out here and include stakeholders who can see the bigger picture. Most of those who participated in the process (big publishers, vendors, ad networks) have a stake in propagating reach as currency. We need some other kinds of voices in the mix.