Building on UKOM: Online insight won’t stand still

Now the debate about whether online needs robust reach and frequency data is behind us, the advertising industry is already thinking ahead. Responding to UKOM’s pre-launch presentation at the MediaTel Group ‘Future of Online’ seminar on February 5, industry experts welcomed the new system. But they warned that UKOM must be built on, to learn as an industry how online can build brands and drive offline response, but also to improve how online media are traded.

One of UKOM’s planned additions later in 2010 is video measurement, which can’t come too soon for investors in initiatives like Project Canvas. At last week’s MediaTel Group ‘The Internet Comes To TV’ event, both Bob Wootton of ISBA and Rhys McLachlan of Mediacom warned that Canvas meant nothing to advertisers in the absence of substantiation, in the form of metrics that demonstrate what advertising on the platform really adds to a campaign.

Many of the media owners who have invested to get UKOM off the ground have strong interests in traditional media, particularly TV and press. For these companies, the issues are maintaining share and monetising content online, and they will be keen to explore how they can demonstrate the cross-platform reach of their brands. This will start to be possible later in the year when UKOM data is fused to IPA TouchPoints 3.

UKOM itself is not designed to be a trading currency: with data available on how many times an ad is served, buying audience to the webpage, no matter how robust, wouldn’t do advertisers many favours. But combining these two data sources, as proposed in an article in Advertising Age yesterday, may provide the key: a rating points measure for trading online.