NewMediaZero: IAB US questions plans for UK audience measurement standard

Greg Stuart, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) U.S. chief, questioned the efforts being put into the U.K.'s IAB plan to try to measure and quantify the online audience into a common currency. He said that the impression is the most important measure to get right first, and that using demography to divvy up audiences isn't a good model, as it proves not to be a very good indicator of online behavior, such as purchasing.

The U.S. interactive market saw a lurch toward demographic standardization in the late 1990s, when the relatively Internet ignorant ad agencies sought a common scale on which they could compare online media to the ones with which they were already familiar. As performance metrics, such as sales and brand movement, have begun to gain in popularity demography has become less and less of a perceived priority in the U.S. Some executives have even begun calling it a vestige of a mass media make-do measurement.

Back in Britain, AOL's local director disagreed. "I think demographics are a very good indicator of people's buying habits," said Greg Paine. The difference in opinion may very well have everything to do with the relative scale of the markets. With online advertising beating out broadcast radio in the U.S., it constitutes a market that can be precisely divvied up into behavioral and contextual bits, rather than demographics, and still maintain a reasonable scale. In Britain, that is more difficult.