Accountability on the Web

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 1998 by Dzintars Dzilna

Advertising agencies have always relied on accredited numbers of circulation, distribution and demographics for launching campaigns in printed materials. But what about the Web? Even though services for auditing Web activity have been available for some time, agencies today are only slowly spending ad money on Web campaigns.

The fact is, the advertising industry is still hammering out standards for Web audience measurement. Media directors agree that they want better knowledge of how a Web-based ad campaign will boost sales and brand awareness. "You expect different things in the interaction from people who are using the Web.... There's a lot that we don't understand about it and I don't think the magazines do either," says Susan Nathan, senior vice president, director of media resources for New York City-based McCann-Erickson.

Still, at least one magazine industry stalwart has recently moved to preach trust in the new medium, as well as promote its interactive unit. Schaumburg, Illinois-based Audit Bureau of Circulations launched its own advertising campaign -- online, as well as in print -- urging advertisers to demand audited proof of "the numbers." Folio: asked four interactive agency representatives about what Web auditing means for magazine publishers in the new medium.

Davis Stewart

It's the issue of accountability. You said you served up 500,000 of my ad banners -- prove it. It's like when you say you distributed two million copies of your magazine last month -- prove it. Same basic issues.

I'm not sure anyone has per se told publishers of a Web site that they have to [use an auditor]. But when there's lots of money at stake, there's going to be a reluctance, if not an unwillingness, to invest much money in a Web site -- certainly one that's claiming substantial traffic -- without having an audit to prove it. As you get into more specialized places, the magazine parallel is back; with the smaller-circulation magazines, you're more likely to accept some other form [of auditing proof, e.g., a print order or a sworn statement]. But as you go from the hundreds of dollars to the tens of thousands of dollars, there's a greater need to look after the client to ensure that what you're buying is what you think you're buying.

Eric Heneghan

Most of our [Web] advertising now is not based on impressions [i.e., Web ads sold strictly by the number of times they are downloaded by Web users], so we are not totally dependent on the content partner to deliver that [number of impressions]. We will structure those deals when bandwidth increases and ads can be more compelling.

When we are dependent upon the content partner to give us that [impression] information, then we definitely care about an auditor. It's important to know that in impression standards there's somebody making sure that those numbers are real. And who they are isn't as important as their reliability. It is confusing because there are so many people competing to be that person right now.

Jennifer Sokol

There is a debate in the industry, mostly between buyers and sellers, about what constitutes an impression. We want to know that an impression is representative of a page with an ad in which the image is actually downloaded, so that we know for sure that we're buying something that's being seen by the Web user. A lot of sites are selling what they call impressions based on insertions, which actually means that they know technically that the ad is being served. However, they can't necessarily verify that the ad was downloaded -- that the image actually appeared successfully.

Jeff Ratner

The reason we have ABC statements and BPA statements is that we need a third party to verify the numbers, and that's as important online as it is in print. But I really think the big goal of all of that, at least in the short term, is apples-to-apples type comparisons. The fact is, each magazine might have another way of doing things [e.g., using one of many ad server software packages]; so as a media buyer, I'm looking at different people's numbers from different sources, and they all use different methodologies to get at these numbers. So it's difficult to make quantitative comparisons. At least when magazines are using one of the various auditing services, there is a benchmark that we can look at and say, "Okay, they're using the same technologies. We know this magazine's numbers are equivalent to that magazine's numbers." I think that's the big role of auditing at this point.