[ICOM] The arrival, measurement vendors and trends

I arrived in Lisbon and got an email as soon as I got to the hotel requesting my participation in a roundtable chat focused on emerging market measurement for Africa and the Middle East. So much for standing for silently on the sidelines! A quick check-in and I was off to register at the conference venue with my Bookmarks 2008 t-shirt to make me easy to spot! Turns out I was a little underdressed. Measurement is the business side of media - even the techies seemed to be in suits yesterday!

I introduced myself to a few people and headed into the Ibero-American Summit programme. I'd been given a special invite to this stream of the conference which seeks to give weight to the Latin American industry which is looking at regional solutions. I had hoped to learn some lessons, but this stream wasn't to be of too much interest to me, and I headed off to join the Knowledge Centre presentations for the rest of the day.

The Knowledge Centre was a brilliant series of short presentations from leading vendors on the latest trends. The right place for me to be as far as the OPA is concerned, as it provided a snapshot of the major players and key trends.

Fascinating

I popped in and out of these Knowledge Centre sessions during the afternoon and some of them were fascinating.

The first was from Akamai and its new analytics layer for video (Flash, Silverlight and iPhone). It looks really robust and allows media owners to answer questions such as: "Does better video quality improve content engagement?" - a tough question for our market due to our relatively kak bandwidth, but interesting none the less.

Further, it seems analytics providers are opening up their platforms to integrate with media owners' custom meta data, to create unique reports.

Throughout the presentation, product manager James Hutchens kept saying how the data improves "programming decisions", but I must say I don't quite understand it. Doesn't programming relate to scheduled broadcasting rather than on-demand media? I'll have to find him [today] and understand what he meant.

Monitoring social media

Next of interest was Brandwatch, which monitors social media. Seems they're the leader in the space locally dominated by Quirk's Brandseye. This area of audience measurement is gaining importance, and these guys seem to have built a content query and reporting approach that can actually give a customer a monetary value for ROI if they react to social media messages about their brand. Not my thing, but understand how it's part of the mix.

The pure measurement companies that I saw were all interesting and different in approaches. A new player called Alenty showed amazing tech using AJAX to monitor much more of what is actually viewed on a page (rather than what is assumed to be viewed because the page loaded). Really impressive stuff.

Effective Measures seem to have become a major emerging market force. It focused on its market insights rather than its solution, which was very relevant to us in SA. It focuses on Asia and the Middle East, and has similar trends in mobile phone use to deal with. During the smoke break, I landed up being invited out for dinner with its CEO.

Thinking differently

Two of the strongest presentations I saw were from Eyeblaster and Visible Measures. Both are thinking differently about the space, and I think they're onto something.

Visible Measures believe intently that video is the medium that will bring brand advertising spend into the digital realm - I hope so, it has eluded us all thus far!

Eyeblaster had a brilliant show that took us through just how complicated the world of advertising production and placement has become in a digital, real-time world. In essence, digital marketing is too complex, and it is the major inhibitor to increasing spend.

I had to miss the rest of the presentations due to the roundtable, but have setup private meetings with all the key measurement vendors over the next two days to ensure I get a clear picture of the current landscape.

Can learn a lot from peers

The content of the round table discussion cannot be made public at this stage, but a statement may be released by ICOM later in the week. What I can say is that we have a good set of experiences to share as a case study, and that we can learn a lot from our peers in other markets if we want to get the basics right and avoid many mistakes that have been made by others. I plan to actively engage with more organisations globally in the year ahead.

At the time of writing this post, Id just returned from dinner with the guys from Effective Measure and a few others. Got to see a bit of Lisbon, which was a plus. I sadly missed presentations from Google, ComScore, Nielsen and Quantcast due to the roundtable. Today is another day, though, and I'll be sure to catch up.

If you have questions to pose to a particular speaker/session from a SA perspective, please tweet me on @joshprefix and use #ICOM. Follow the event on Twitter at #ICOM: Twitter Search results and Bing Twitter search results. As mentioned, you'll find my tweets at @joshprefix.

Josh