Thoughts on the MMX 360 Announcement at the Conversational Media Summit

Last Monday I spoke to a packed room at Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit in New York, where I announced Comscore’s new digital audience measurement initiative, MMX 360.

I’ve known John Battelle for many years and was delighted to announce this initiative at his conference and receive his support. John said, “As one of its first participants, Federated Media is firmly in support of Comscore’s MMX 360 measurement initiative. This new hybrid approach represents a critically important evolution in online audience measurement, especially for publishers and content networks, by better accounting for niche audiences, distributed content and the mobile environment. We view it as an important leap forward for the industry.”

MMX 360 will offer a best-of-breed approach to digital measurement that continues to revolve around measuring what matters most to the online advertising industry – people. This ‘panel-centric hybrid’ solution combines person-level measurement from Comscore’s proprietary 2 million person global panel with Web site server metrics in order to account for 100 percent of a Web site’s audience.

Even in the initial stages of implementation of the total system, we already have server-side coverage of over 80 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience, or approximately 160 million people. And we have observed 400 million unique Comscore cookies among this group of users in a month. There are two quick points I’d like to make about these facts. The first is that if we do the math (400 million cookies/160 million people) it equates to approximately 2.5 unique cookies per person. If that number sounds at all familiar to you, it might be because that was the same cookie inflation factor we identified in our 2007 study of cookie deletion rates. The second point I will highlight is that the phenomenon of cookie deletion ends up creating many more unique cookies than there are Internet users. Put another way, cookies alone cannot be used to accurately count unique visitors to a web site. The use of cookies inevitably leads to an overstatement of the actual visitor base.

After my presentation I received a number of interesting and insightful questions concerning our new measurement initiative. I’ll share the most interesting one with you.

Will this initiative enable Comscore to perform deeper analysis on individual advertising campaigns?Yes, the integration of the highly granular server data with the understanding of the characteristics of the people exposed to a particular campaign (that only panel data can provide) will enable an unparalleled understanding of campaign performance. We will be able to view the actual delivery of ad campaigns faster and in great detail, which will ultimately result in more actionable analysis and the design of more effective online media plans.

Finally, we’ve received many inquiries and requests for the slides from my presentation since our announcement, so I’d like to invite you to download them here if you are interested in finding out more about Comscore’s industry-changing initiative.