Online marketing firm DoubleClick said in a study released yesterday that it can fill the void in demographic data between pre-campaign planning and post-campaign reporting with new methodologies.
Working with media research firms comScore Networks, Nielsen//NetRatings and Interactive Market Systems, along with ad agencies on pilot projects, DoubleClick, New York, developed methods to bridge the gap in demographic information by combining its ad management and serving program DART for Advertisers with the research firms' consumer panel information.
The research was needed because, after an ad campaign is executed, ad serving data contain only numbers of impressions served, reach and frequency and performance metrics such as the click-through rate, according to the DoubleClick report, titled “Target Demographics, Before and After.”
“Although those numbers all provide valuable information for advertisers, they do not contain demographic information to indicate how successful the campaign was at reaching its audience targets,” the report said.
In one pilot, DoubleClick and comScore tested an online campaign for a skin-care product advertiser via ad agency MediaVest. ComScore used an image-matching technology to recognize creative ad units as they appeared in the browsers of its 1.5 million-person panel. ComScore then could establish the demographic composition of the audience exposed to the campaign, based on its knowledge of its panel members.
In another test, Nielsen//NetRatings used a standard browser cookie approach to measure the demographic composition of a campaign conducted by ad agency mOne, New York, on behalf of a client advertising a baby product. Preparing the campaign in DoubleClick's DART for Advertisers, mOne attached an extra tracking pixel to each ad unit that corresponded to a Nielsen//NetRatings cookie, and matched those to members of the Nielsen//NetRatings MegaPanel of more than 100,000 members.
Ad agencies and DoubleClick executives are calling the pilots a success.
“This work provides a good first-step platform for validating the predictive capability of reach-frequency planning models on the Web,” said Gerard Broussard, senior partner and director of media analytics media for mOne.
“Reliable reports that detail the audience composition of ad schedules on a post-campaign basis, and the reach and frequency of actual ad exposures to target demographics, can be provided to advertisers online without great difficulty,” said Doug Knopper, senior vice president and general manager of ad management at DoubleClick.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
