Comscore boss: Next time we bid against Nielsen for the IAB tender we’ll have local trust
The boss of Comscore – which was defeated by Nielsen in the race to be endorsed as Australia’s online audience measurement provider – has suggested his company had a superior product but lost because it is less well known locally.
Will Hodgman, executive vice president of Comscore’s international operation, told Mumbrella that the company will be ramping up its presence in Australia in order to have a better shot when the process begins again in about two years’ time.
The tender from the Interactive Advertising Bureau encouraged a hybrid system – blending data from tags on websites with an audience panel. The other competitors were Colmar Brunton with Gemius; Roy Morgan Research with Effective Measure and Vizisense.
The hybrid offering is still a new one from Nielsen which finally went live at the end of last month, five months after winning the tender.
Hodgman said: “We’ve been doing it longer, in more countries. Nielsen do it in three countries now. We do it in 43.
“We’ve been doing it since September 2009 while Nielsen have started much more recently. It ain’t easy to do it fast.”
Hodgman said that Comscore also offered more choice in measuring online audiences across multiple devices.
He said: “I don’t like coming second. We put our heart and soul into it. With all due respect to everybody in the processs, for the most part, I don’t think Australia knows us that well.”
On rival providers, he said: “Maybe the guys already there are not the best, but you know them.
“They made the expected choice. For better or worse, they went with what they knew.”
Comscore is now led locally by Australia and New Zealand VP Amy Weinberger, who has been in Australia for just over a year. She was with ComScore in the US since 2003.
Hodgman said: “We have people on the ground now and that’s going to be part of it for next time. We’ve faced this in other places and if people don’t know you they are careful.
“We are committed to the country and we are not going anywhere. Australia is a big deal for us. It looks to us like Australia has the biggest growth rate in online spend in any developed country.”
Hodgman – who in a previous role was EVP at Nielsen – predicted that the next tender would be fought on different ground. He said: The next chapter is when you measure the effectiveness of the ad spend.”
He added: “From the moment we heard the news we came in second we began to start thinking of two years from now. We will go at it again.”
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A couple of points to clarify the facts regarding this post and some of Will’s reported comments:
Firstly, the tender from the IAB did not “demand” a hybrid solution – the exact wording in the tender document was:
“The Services may, but are not required to, leverage and combine multiple data sources (panel and site data) to provide rich, detailed planning data that can be used by publishers, agencies and advertisers to provide a greater depth of analysis (reach, frequency, duration, duplication etc) than is currently available in the Australian market.”
Secondly, whilst Will of course thinks comScore has a superior product, that was not the assessment of the Tender Review Group (TRG)(against the technical evaluation criteria) chaired by media industry veteran and expert Ian Muir and comprising measurement specialists from IAB members, the MFA and the AANA.
Lastly, Will and comScore are great competitors and the IAB welcomes continued investment and competition in this market. As Will states, Australia is an important market and “has the biggest growth rate in online spend in any developed country.”
In the meantime, we have an industry-endorsed, world-leading hybrid online audience measurement system, Nielsen Online Ratings, underpinned by a panel audited by an independent auditor and accredited by the IAB, fully operational and commercially available to the market, that will accelerate the continued growth of this market past $3billion in 2012, and $4 billion in 2014, by providing buyers and sellers alike the most accurate, credible data this market has ever had access to.
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“The next chapter is when you measure the effectiveness of the ad spend”
No. Publishers won’t care about that and they are the ones that pay the Nielsen bills at the end of the day as well as subsidise the IAB and its salary costs. Comscore won’t be able to win this with an on ground American unless they can demonstrate they can provide higher user numbers for the sites than Nielsen.
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Hi Paul,
Thanks for your comment. On your first point, I’ve updated the article to use the word “encouraged” rather than “demanded”.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella