Research Advisory Board tapped by IAC

In their efforts to make the online ad space more user friendly - for advertisers and for consumers - the Interactive Advertising Bureau has created a new board to help create audience measurement guidelines.

by Kristina Knight

The board is called the Research Advisory Board.

Members are being called upon to help create a set of guidelines that will cover how international traffic, cookie deletion practices and spiders impact audience measurement services. They will also create guidelines for advertisers as a kind of best practices for measuring the impact of the online audience.

These aren't the first rumblings about audience measurement practices from the IAB. In April, the group sent an open letter to comScore and Nielsen//Netratings, two of the biggest measurement firms, asking for more transparency in their findings. The IAB asked that the companies provide more information as to how they arrive at their measurement figures since those figures are quite often different from the logs of the companies that they measure. Both organizations submitted to an auditing process.

“The entire marketing-media value chain wants and needs clarity and transparency in interactive audience measurement,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “We were gratified that so many industry stakeholders have supported this drive, and we’re committed to working with all of them to continue to prove – and improve upon the fact – that interactive media are unparalleled in their ability to reach and engage consumers in ways that can accountably drive marketers’ growth.”