Why measurement is important - and why Facebook and even Google will eventually play ball

The hot topic in the social media space at the moment is measurement. Triggered by Facebook’s announcement that it had overstated average video viewing times, sparking anger from both publishers and advertisers already frustrated at the seemingly bottomless well into which they had been pouring their money and resources for the past year.

In response, Facebook have announced that they will be tying up with third parties including Oracle, Nielsen, MarketShare and Visual IQ to improve measurement of campaigns.

Simultaneously, while Google continues to provide a host of metrics on its own dashboard for YouTube, it nevertheless jealously guards the underlying audience data. (A confession though - I am not an expert on YouTube metrics).

The worst part for both the content providers who make these platforms tick and the advertisers who want to reach the massive audiences they generate is that there seems to be no end in sight. Massive, seemingly endless year-on-year growth creating ever bigger quasi-monopolistic platforms with little or no incentive to bend to the will of others.

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s not all that different from the what happened around the rise of both print and broadcasting. And the good news is that in both cases, the parties involved were able to work together to create metrics that - while not perfect - were at least reasonably universally accepted.

Following early attempts at magazines in Germany and the UK in the 17th and 18th Centuries, it was in the Victoria era that publishing really exploded. Newspaper and magazines were the first and, until the mass adoption of radio in the Twenties and Thirties, the only form of mass communication. They dominated the media market for 150 years, building huge circulations and enormous influence over public opinion and government policy.

Yet the publishing industry suffered from the same issues of transparency and accountability that plagues the digital world today, and for far longer. It wasn’t until 1931, with the simultaneous founding of both the ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) and the BPA that consistent, transparent standards of circulation reporting began to be introduced.

Interestingly, both the ABC and the BPA were founded by both advertisers and publishers working together collaboratively to deliver the new standards.

It was only after the Second World War that publishing’s dominance was ended, with the enormous explosion of television. This graph shows that in the US, TV enjoyed Facebook levels of blockbuster growth in penetration for 25 years or more from 1950.

Here, having learned the lessons of publishing’s lengthy period of opacity, the industry was quicker to react. Nielsen ratings first emerged in 1947 for radio and 1950 for television providing an imperfect but consistent view of audience viewing habits.

There’s a crucial difference between publishing and broadcasting however, and one that affects the digital space equally. Broadcasting measurement doesn’t require the consent of the broadcaster - Nielsen could put its diaries or boxes into homes without ABC or NBC being able to do anything about it. Only the buy-in of the advertiser for the methodology was required to make the system effective. In the years since its launch, however, the broadcasting industry has actively collaborated with Nielsen and other similar systems to improve their effectiveness and accuracy.

Publishing, like digital, require the consent of the publisher to be truly effective. Only the publisher - or platform in this case - knows the true picture and the audit bureau’s job is more about agreeing standards and providing assurance than actual measurement.

So where does all this leave the likes of Facebook and Google going forward?

The example of publishing shows that it was certainly possible for a booming mass communication industry to operate without transparency for many decades. But the world has moved on, and crucially advertisers have become used to understandable, accountable, transparent metrics that enable them to plan their activity and track its effectiveness.

The advertisers are out there, ready and willing to collaborate, and used to doing so over a period of almost a hundred years. Now is the time for the large digital platforms to show that they too have learned the lessons of their predecessors and embrace their partners in creating measurement systems that everyone understands and accepts.

Google is 16 years old this year and Facebook is 12 - these are still young companies but they have changed the world forever. Time for them to put away childish things..

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