The Advertising Research Foundation has released findings of an ad industry survey on the quality of media audience measurement, revealing that no major media have adequate measurement methods for the way people use them, writes MediaPost. The survey gives poor grades to the methods that are the basis of advertising planning and buying. Key inadequacies of current audience research were common for all media surveyed: inability to meet the changing needs of media planners, and the poor quality of audience samples - including inadequate size and "representativeness" of samples. Online was found to lack two "basic requisites" for audience measurement.

First, online lacks demographically defined audiences; second, it lacks the ability to reliably accumulate those over standard time periods, according to the findings.

"The lack of adequate integration of the audience metrics provided by third-party ad servers and publishers/sites with the Web-user panels led respondents to judge the metrics as only 'vehicle-centric rather than user-session related,'" concluded the report.

Importantly, the ARF said online audience measurement is incompatible with that of other major media, making it nearly impossible for online to be compared on a like-for-like basis.