Last week, Gian Fulgoni and I were in China as guests of Baidu, the leading Chinese Search Engine. Baidu had invited Gian to participate in the “The Baidu World Conference 2008” in Shanghai, China on June 5th. Not only did we meet many industry leaders in China, we also got to see one of the greatest cities in China.

There were more than 2,000 people from various Internet companies attending the conference. As two of the handful of “VIPs” of the conference, Gian and I were invited to walk down the “red carpet” together to enter the conference, and got an unexpected reaction from several groups of attendees: “They look like the two guys from the movie ‘Rain Man”. Of course, they meant Gian looks like Dustin Hoffman, not that I (a Chinese guy) look anything like Tom Cruise.

Gian was also one of the six guests who were invited onto the stage, along with the CEO of Baidu, for the opening ceremony. It was terrific to have comScore’s name introduced in China, in front of people from hundreds of Chinese companies and officials from a variety of government agencies.

It was a great conference, great exposure, interactions with great people in a great city on a great trip!

Hi, I'm Will Hodgman one of the founders, along with Seamus McAteer, of M:Metrics. Now that M:Metrics is a part of comScore, I have to say that I feel like I have come home, again. In 1999, my first company – Ad Relevance - was bought by Media Metrix. Now, nine years later, comScore, which bought Media Metrix in 2002, buys M:Metrics. There is a digital symmetry to this. It’s easy to put the digital bread crumbs together, but there is more karma than logic here. I may be the only person in the world who has been a Senior Executive for the following four digital measurement companies – comScore, Media Metrix, NetRatings (aka, Nielsen Online), and (ok a slight cheat, I was on their Board of Directors) Hitwise – not at the same time, of course.

I believe I have learned a lot. Digital media measurement has been part solving chaos, part media science, and part art. We are blessed by the people and technical innovation that allows us to do all three. We, in the counting business, are also blessed that digital media is like rabbits. With rabbits, there are lots of bunnies. The bunnies grow up and become rabbits. Rabbits make more bunnies.

We are certainly at the sharp-end of media and measurement convergence. We are turning the corner to include what I see as the "measurement of the ONE". Measurement as a practice has evolved to include: the many (HH, TV), the few (Internet, home, work and school) and now the one (mobile). The future is arriving at a rapid pace.

In the meantime, M:Metrics and comScore have combined forces to measure wire-line and wireless access across devices, locations, people and countries. This is wildly exciting. As clients expect more, they will get more.

Thank you and I look forward to speaking with you regularly from the comScore blog.

Hello, my name is Ian Eccleston from the Marketing Communications department at comScore. I'd like to share with you some rather interesting comScore data related to rocketing gas prices.

Average U.S. gas prices recently reached a record high of $4.09 per gallon in the week of June 9, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This hasn’t been good news for consumers and most businesses, but it has generated a lot of traffic to the Gasbuddy Organization, the largest web property which publishes the location of the cheapest gas prices available within local areas. Gasbuddy recorded a record high of 2.5 million unique visitors in May 2008 according to comScore Media Metrix. Interestingly, Gasbuddy's Web traffic and the fluctuation in average monthly gas prices have a striking correlation, as shown in the chart below.

Not surprisingly, the top-performing search terms for Gasbuddy in April 2008 were phrases that include “gas prices”, according to comScore Marketer, a service from comScore that helps clients optimize their search engine marketing programs. One hundred percent of the clicks on these terms that lead to GasBuddy are organic, likely driven by SEO tactics such as including “gas prices” in the URLs of GasBuddy sites, such as www.newyorkgasprices.com and www.illinoisgasprices.com.

Nearly 1 million people conducted 1.73 million searches for phrases including “gas prices” in the U.S. in April 2008, according to comScore Marketer, an increase of 175 percent from April 2007. When average gas prices increased 10 percent from October to November – the largest monthly increase by percentage in the last year, many consumers rapidly made their way to the search box to find deals on gasoline, as shown in the chart below.

GasBuddy was the happy beneficiary of these searches – 37 percent of the searches for “gas prices” phrases clicked through to a GasBuddy site, driving 640,000 visits from the U.S. to the property in April 2008.

It’s interesting to see how Web behavior/search activity often reflects our everyday concerns in the offline world. As the data above show, many consumers are using the Web to try to find a way to minimize how much they have to spend on gas. It's not dissimilar to the way that consumers are increasingly using online shopping comparison engines to find the lowest prices for products across a wide range of product categories.

This blog post originally appeared as my column in MediaPost's Online Metrics Insider on June 17.

It's funny how things stay with you.

In the fall of 1980, as a second-half senior at NYU, I was taking a class called Advertising and Media Planning. I'd already begun working part-time at Arbitron, so I thought I knew a thing or two. On the midterm, one of the questions was: "Define Gross Rating Points." I confidently answered: "reach times frequency." But the professor was looking for the textbook answer — "the sum of the ratings achieved by a media schedule" — and my answer was marked wrong. I went to his office and argued, but nothing I could tell him would convince him that, indeed, GRPs are the product of reach and frequency.

I was a cocky kid with big dreams, dreams of one day becoming Chief Research Officer at an Internet Metrics company, so you can imagine how this episode scarred me. If that professor is reading this, then let me assert with all the authority and gravitas of my position at comScore, and as a Media Post columnist: GRPs are the product of Reach and Frequency.

Last week, David Smith argued for the efficacy of GRPs as an Internet advertising metric, and a lively debate ensued in the comment section. The case for online GRPs goes something like this: GRPs put online advertising on equal footing with traditional advertising, thus supporting the migration to, and integration of, online advertising as part of the media mix for more categories, brands and advertisers.

The argument against: GRPs are important to traditional media because those poor slobs have nothing else to measure, but here in the digital age, we can measure clicks per you-name-it, rendering GRPs hopelessly archaic. Besides, why settle for equal footing when our metrics make us better than equal?

Perhaps because of my traumatic experience in college, I find myself in the former camp.

Of course, framing the question as either/or is a false premise.

GRPs can and do co-exist with other, more interactive metrics. In fact, I would even suggest that GRPs are a valuable metric for CPA campaigns — because if I know that a certain creative execution is generating actions against a specific target population, I'd like to know: (1) What percent of that target was exposed to the campaign? (maybe I will get more activities by putting it in front of more of that target); and (2) What is the optimal number of exposures to my campaign to elicit that action? (Online advertisers care about this, hence frequency capping.) Can I better manage my CPA campaign if I track these metrics? If yes, well, those metrics are reach and frequency, and if I multiply them together, despite what my NYU professor thought, I'll get GRPs. (I should add that even a behavioral target is, indeed, a target.)

There is one other argument against online GRPs that I'd like to dispel: that somehow the Internet doesn't lend itself to GRPs, at least not as readily as TV or print. I know this to be false, because at comScore, we offer a reach/frequency tool as part of our client interface, and about 100 interactive agencies regularly use this tool to plan campaigns for their clients — running, combined, over 20,000 campaigns a month.

Very specifically, this tool allows users to build campaign schedules by allocating numbers of impressions against a target demographic on different sites, and then showing the aggregate, unduplicated reach (and average frequency) of those impressions across sites.

If an advertiser wants to use online advertising to get a message in front of women 21-49 with kids, and to reach 70% of them at least three times, the tools exist to enable that. I can't think of a single good reason to discourage the practice. Indeed, the entire digital space should be encouraging the practice, because that is the way an awful lot of ad dollars are spent today. The state of the economy is such that competition across media for ad dollars will be increasingly fierce. Making Internet advertising more user-friendly for the people looking to spend heavily to get a message in front of a target audience — that's a no-brainer. The GRP metric and its component parts does nothing but help.

David Smith noted: "We do not generally have easily accessible reach and frequency data for the Web." I think I know what he means — campaigns are ultimately priced based on served impressions, and while we may be able to create pre-buy campaign metrics as readily as in other media, post-buy evaluation is still held to rely on reporting by third party ad servers; thus, it's prone to all the limitations implied by cookie-based tracking.

I want to point out that many advertisers are already using tools, such as comScore's Ad Metrix, which integrates audience measurement data with ad occurrence data to provide post hoc campaign-level reach and frequency.

I don't think there are obstacles preventing advertisers and agencies from planning online media campaigns based on reach, frequency and GRPs, should they be so inclined. Nor should publishers be discouraged from selling inventory that way, as long as there is a market voracious for cost-efficient, targeted brand advertising.

Many of the readers of this blog will probably remember comScore’s report on Radiohead’s “pay what you want” distribution model for their 2007 album “In Rainbows” back in November. The results of this study precipitated a lively debate in the blogosphere on the merits of this groundbreaking approach to music sales.

It was clear that this “pay what you want” model represented a fascinating case study in both economic theory and human nature. Harvard Business School evidently agreed that it warranted further academic exploration in formulating a new case study entitled “Radiohead: Music at Your Own Price,” based on the comScore data. The two parts of the HBS case study can be found here and here.

The publication of this case study comes on the heels of comScore’s recently published article by our CEO Magid Abraham in the Harvard Business Review on the offline impact of online advertising.

I’m delighted to tell you that if you are an academic interested in using comScore data for a B-School case study or other academic research purposes, please feel free to contact us online.

Last week, I spoke at a widget conference, WidgetWebExpo. The prior (and only other) time I’ve spoken at a conference on this topic was a year ago. At that time, widgets were just starting to get legs, so to speak, and we had just introduced a service to measure them, comScore Widget Metrix.

My over-arching reaction as I looked around one year later was “what a difference a year makes.” The conference a year ago was packed, and had a whole Gen-Y, very edgy feeling — held in an old movie theatre in SoHo; most of the attendees were very young, many dressed in shorts, t-shirts and baseball hats. There was a lot of energy, with a feeling that was closer to a frat party than a conference. On my panel, the speaker next to me proclaimed “the thing about widgets is…if you’re over 30, you just don’t get them.” Ahem. I am indeed well over 30. (Of course I took that to mean I must look very young :))

But to me, there were red flags. There was a lot of fun, cool applications, with no clear value proposition, and for most, no path to monetization. The general thinking was “get distribution, then we’ll worry about that.” I remember one talk where the CEO and founder of a company showed a very fun widget that allowed you to animate an image of yourself, and the audience loved it. Then, he asked the audience (rather somberly): “But who will pay me for this?” No one answered.

This was the state of the widget world at the time: lots of cool technology, and our numbers clearly showed that audiences were gobbling them up — not just in the US, but also abroad. People clearly liked the idea of distributed content — a little nugget they could grab and place in their space that delivered information, content, fun, or a combo of the three. However, with a few exceptions, that pesky little topic of how to actually make money in the space remained unanswered.

That is in stark contrast to this year’s conference. I recognized very few faces from last year. The attendees were fully clad in the usual business casual attire – but, not one baseball cap to be seen. The organizer/sponsor of last year’s conference is no longer in the widget business, and their executives have moved on to other companies. The community has also aged quite a bit — almost everyone in attendance was now over 30, many over 40. There were also many fewer attendees. Overall, the conference was ….. well, let’s just say there was nothing edgy about it.

Although they have changed the way many use the web, widgets clearly have not lived up to the hype they created a year ago. There are a lot of reasons why, including that pesky little problem of having to eventually make money, which has caused more than one of these companies to either fold or pivot and change direction. I learned that Facebook is moving all the widgets to a separate tab so that they don’t show up on the profile page. The term “de-widgetization’ was mentioned more than once. Even Fred Wilson, a big early supporter of widgets both as a user and an investor who spoke at the conference, discussed this in his blog, culminating in his proclamation that ‘widgets suck.’

And yet, VC money continues to flow into the space. According to an article in MarketWatch by Scott Austin, who is an assistant managing editor at VentureWire: “At least 12 start-ups that build or distribute widgets have raised $191 million so far this year, including RockYou, which earlier this week announced a $35 million round of funding.” Feels very circa 1999 to me.

Yet as I see it, something very important is being missed here, or at least not broadly understood. As marketers, it’s not often that we see an environment as we do with both search and distributed content, where we literally have people waving their arms, saying “Hey, over here! I’m interested in this subject/function/content/type of game, etc.” Talk about the opportunity to target!

It’s clear that widgets have demonstrated the potential to do three key things:

1. deliver a very coveted target to advertisers — people who skew younger (both male and female) as well as slightly older groups
   
2. reach an audience of global proportions, often in a very short timeframe
   
3. reach people at the time of engagement—capitalizing on the interest levels, emotional availability, etc.

Those are three very powerful characteristics. So my question is: why aren’t more of these widgets delivering advertising in some form?

Some of them are. I know that Slide, for example, includes advertising, although I have not seen it personally. A notable exception is Splashcast. They develop widgets for the likes of Nike that, based on IP address, will deliver localized widgets with in-language branding and content. That’s a great example, I think, of how to use this medium to reach and build a global audience that widgets can deliver. But I haven’t seen a lot of that.

Being with a measurement company, my bias is of course, that measurement could make an important contribution here. So here’s the project I’d love to do: an ad effectiveness study to quantify the difference in impact between ads delivered in widgets to those same ads delivered to that same target, using traditional placement strategies. For example, I’d like to compare the branding impact/clickthrough/engagement/conversion rates (pick any metric) for a photo-printing ad for Kodak, delivered via a photo-sharing widget as compared to that same ad delivered via a normal campaign. Would the effectiveness of the ads be greater when a young mom is looking at recent pictures of her kids than they would if she saw those ads on other sites while she was, for example, reading the news? What about Nike — will kids be more likely to click on the Nike ad and view the newest cool sneaks when they are engaging with the NCAA widget that delivers the most recent scores than they would on other sites?

I’m betting yes. And while it wouldn’t be a silver bullet for the widget industry, it would be a strong point of quantified value and differentiation that would allow widgets to plant their flag in the busy landscape of the media mix. Perhaps it would even bring back some of those young developers with big ideas in shorts and baseball caps. I miss them.

I was recently privileged to be asked to appear in Adam Buxton’s excellent new BBC3 pilot, MeeBox.

While my fleeting performance in the all too familiar guise of “cheeky cockney rogue” did little to set the world ablaze, the screening of the show itself represented an important signpost in the evolution of online video. As the Times Online recently put it, welcome to the world of Internet TV.

When I made my last post a month or so ago, I focused on the technological implications of the convergence of television and the Internet, but what is also becoming increasingly interesting is the cultural effects that online video is beginning to have on the traditional television medium.

MeeBox is made up entirely of online video style content, a full length television sketch show dedicated to the humorous clips of the online video world. The whole thing is polished off with an exclusive soundtrack from the awesome and equally online savvy, Radiohead, reaffirming that what was once thought the preserve of a very niche community of early adopters has now well and truly made it into the mainstream.

Even more captivating is that the show – like almost all of the BBC’s content these days – was made instantly available online via the BBC iPlayer. So that’s online videos, packaged together and screened as a television show, distributed over the Internet…what’s that about life imitating art… imitating life?!

The comScore figures certainly underline the uptake in online video usage over the past year. According to comScore, YouTube alone has grown 71 percent over the past twelve months to reach 307 million worldwide visitors in May 2008, with 18.4 million of these visitors coming from within the U.K.

Analysis from comScore Video Metrix, which was launched in the U.K. earlier this year, shows that online video viewing in the U.K. is rising sharply. The number of videos being watched by U.K. viewers grew significantly over the first quarter of 2008, increasing 13 percent from December 2007 to reach 3.5 billion videos for the month of March, while the total time spent watching videos online grew 10 percent, to reach a total of 172 million hours in March.

The growing importance of online video technology – to both the Internet and traditional media alike – cannot be overstated, and to view this medium simply as a technological advancement that offers an alternative way of distributing moving pictures would be to underestimate its appeal. This sector has become a cultural phenomenon that is changing the way we think about and interact with media, and as the screeing of MeeBox last weekend showed, this is a culture that looks set to become ever more engrained into the mainstream.

Hi, I’m Edward Hunter. I’ve been a gamer for many years and now have the perfect job working with comScore clients in the gaming industry.

I’d like to share some things I’ve learned along the way. My advice might not be sage or even wise. In fact, without comScore numbers at my disposal, I'm pretty powerless. But, I do know a couple of things.

Never, ever, let anyone see behind the curtain.

Pretty simple, right? Well, you'd be surprised how many MMO's have lost their mojo by violating this simple rule. I remember the first GM position I took a long time ago. It was for an exceptional text based MMO that I really loved. I was sort of a trouble maker, but I was creative so they gave me a shot.

The process involved my creating a new account with GM powers. I would log in and appear in the GM lounge and that was that. But it wasn't. Right away, I was no longer bound to the constraints of players. I could have any item. See any creature and with a simple word or gesture, dispatch it. I was in heaven, or so I thought.

Everything was great until I tried to play the game as a player again. I couldn't do it. The goals of reaching great heights no longer held any appeal to me, and, why should they? Just moments before I was creating creatures, now defeating them just didn't have any appeal.

I never played that game the same way again, and eventually quit. I had loved that game.

I used to play Ultima Online and wow, I was doing great. I was a woodcutter by trade and was just having fun sort of building stuff and you know, life was good.

Then I got an emulator. Yeah, I could run my very own UO shards, create objects, maps, buildings -- you name it. Very cool, until of course, I tried to actually play UO again. That was more than 7 years ago. Haven't ever gone back.

I played an MMO in beta recently. Decent game, it really was. It was a new metaphor for the genre, one I won’t reveal because frankly anyone halfway savvy reading this would immediately identify it. Anyway, played the beta, even preordered. That’s how cool it was.

I logged in on the last day. I was excited for the server wipe because like many beta players, I had firsthand knowledge of how to get a leg up before the unwashed masses started playing.

I went to a local NPC shop and, to my horror, there were experience books there. They were cheap and allowed me to instantly level my beta character to the highest level possible. Of course I did it. Of course I ran off and obtained what I tried so hard to obtain in the beta, what I knew I would try equally hard to obtain in the live game.

So there I was with all the goodies. It was great.

I never played the game again once it went live. I tried, once, but...I had already seen behind the curtain. Once I had experienced end game content, the mystery was gone and so was the appeal.

The lesson I learned is: don't promote paying players to GM's unless you have a damn good system in place.

Another lesson is: don't design your games so they can be emulated. Always keep something so key to the game’s operation that it keeps the smart ones guessing. And when they figure it out, change it. Change it again, and again. At random. Make it clear to your paying subscribers that any client detected having played on an emulator will be permanently banned from the live game.

Finally, don’t ever expose your end game content during beta to players who haven't gotten there by their own means. It might seem like a great reward, but I'm here to tell you, it’s a game killer. Period.