[ICOM] The I-COM Summit gets down to business...

I'd hoped to blog throughout the proceedings, but while I find the idea of documenting and tweeting stuff in real time novel and webby, you cannot escape the fact that conferences are about person-to-person networking in the real-world! In this way, I suppose I'm not a geek at all, and I love to work an event like this very hard, getting to the people I need to and engaging in the conversations.

I had an early start yesterday. Too early, in fact, as I'm completely zonked - my first meeting was at 6.30am for a demo with Quantcast's Adam Gerber before he flew out.

Quantcast is an aggressive, new player with a free service play for media owners which makes revenue off the back of a targeting platform. It also does demographics by inference on activity across its network. I'm unsure about that for our market due to sample size and the fact that inference rules have to consider a market's cultural oddities - I would guess that it's focused on a US/UK model of behaviour.

It's really cool to use its free tools, though, to see what the US market looks like.

Fantastic keynotes

The keynotes were fantastic. I did my duty and tweeted through these (@joshprefix). Thanks for the comments I got from some followers.

Geoff Ramsay (CEO eMarketer) is a dynamic speaker and a strong character. Very excitable and great insights and predictions.

The CEO of comScore was less excitable, but very well considered and gave me a view into just how big a challenge we face within the sector. You can see that its CEO really takes measurement personally. In chats with his staff, apparently he gets dirty with the algorithms they use and is a real data guy at the core. It permeates in the confidence with which comScore talk about its approach. It certainly think its onto the right model with their its model of site beaconing, combined with a panel.

The best way to get into what was talked about is through Twitter on the #ICOM hashtag: Twitter Search results and Bing Twitter search results.

Three key take-aways

The rest of the day were leaders in specific areas giving short presentations followed by panel debates. I won't get into it all (see the programme for 11 March for the topics/people), but I have three key take-aways:

1. The click as a metric has been, well, a bit of a disaster. It holds little value for brand advertisers, and people who do click are actually less desirable audiences than those who don't, it would appear from the research. But it was the simplest of all this digital mess to understand, and now it needs to change.
2. Ad buyers need a way to compare digital simply to the other media they spend on (eg TV). This is the only way for us get a bigger portion of total advertising spend. People are not sure if GRPs are the answer, but they can be used to make media planners split budgets to digital first on a GRP basis, and then plan on the medium.
3. The measurement industry's greatest contribution to growth of our sector can be to enable brand advertising in the digital realm. The way I now see it, paid search has succeeded because it's quite simple to understand. (match keyword to product and pay). If the analytics and ad-serving platforms can get it right over the next few years to allow brand advertisers to reach desired demographics across many digital properties, we'll bring the brand advertisers online, and fundamentally shift the spend allocations going forward. Cool, huh?!

I had many sideline meetings throughout the day, and have demos now from most the measurement vendors. Dinner was at a big casino and I got to sit next to Henry Stevens, director of media & entertainment at GSMA. We had a ripper of a chat about mobile and emerging markets. I learnt a lot from him about the move to get operators more involved in the media side of the mobile business, and how the GSMA is driving that.

Day three begins. Will report back on Monday...

If you have questions to pose to a particular speaker/session from a South African perspective, please tweet me on @joshprefix and use #ICOM. As mentioned, you'll find my tweets at @joshprefix.

Josh