NETIMPERATIVE COMMENT: IAB brushes over standards issue

The 'Leadership Council' of the UK IAB now counts senior executives of Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Ask Jeeves, ANM and ValueClick among its number and the past few months have clearly involved these bigwigs in writing up something of an action plan. Its goal? To double the market share claimed by internet advertising, as a proportion of total ad spend, from 1% to 2% by the end of next year. Its method? This is somewhat less clear.

IAB chief Danny Meadows-Klue names the body's five key programmes as being Research, Marketing, Education, Standards and Public Affairs. Of these, the IAB has isolated marketing and research as being the two it intends to 'uprate' the most, the reasoning being that advertisers need solid research that proves the value of internet campaigns to be persuaded to commit budgets, while the image of internet advertising itself needs a serious overhaul to back the quantative evidence.

However, practical plans for achieving this uprating appear - at this stage at least - a little more thin on the ground than the rhetoric. The case for the internet deserving a greater share of budgets has been the same for the past two years at least. If you compare its share of media consumption with its 'offline' rivals, that case ought to be rather open and shut. So the question to be asked, and which the Leadership Council has clearly been troubling itself with most, is why the 'disconnect' - as Meadows-Klue puts it - between internet consumption and internet ad spend?

The answer to that question frames any kind of response or strategy to address the internet's problem. And, for us, the answer, more than anything, is standards.

Achieving a standard measure for the use of websites has been the web's most troublesome issue, chiefly because it is the one that everybody wants to 'own'. ABCe, Hitwise, NetValue, Nielsen//NetRatings - countless others - all offer a guide to the popularity of websites, but clients know better than anyone the old addage about statistics and would prefer one measure - and one alone - because at least then they have a consistent comparison.

Clients, like media owners, are emerging from the tech collapse with purse strings so tight they make Wayne Sleep's leotard appear generous and, as long as a client lacks a basic, accepted measure for a site's audience, it will prefer instead to stick with what it knows.

The reasons for this, as the IAB is well aware, are wide-ranging and do indeed include a structure at big budget clients that favours a formulaic approach to both creative and media-planning issues that is essentially numbers-based. But, as the buyer, they are frankly entitled to do as they please; internet media owners must instead take the mountain to Mohammed and this means making internet media buying less of a leap of faith.

Unfortunately, the IAB's response to the question of standards is that it remains 'a long-term goal.' While the IAB's new push is to be welcomed and the target of 2% is more than achievable, even through plain evolution, the question of a standard audience measure remains crucial and should be at the top, rather than at the bottom, of the IAB's improved agenda.



"Email us about this story ":mailto:editorial@netimperative.com