IAB Demands comScore, Nielsen/NetRatings Submit to Audit

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has sent an open letter to the two major internet audience measurement services, comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings (NNR), requesting that they submit to a third-party audit of their measurement processes, the IAB announced today (via MarketingVox).

The IAB said its goal, and that of its interactive industry members, is to achieve transparency in audience counts and to revise out-of-date methodologies, adding that “despite a multiplicity of reported discrepancies in audience measurements, comScore and NNR each has resisted numerous requests for audits by the IAB and the Media Ratings Council since 1999.”

To establish the source of apparent discrepancies between the audience measurements of comScore and NNR and those of the server logs of the IAB members, and find potential solutions, the IAB said, it has asked that both comScore and NNR obtain audits of their technologies and processes by the Media Rating Council (MRC).

Media companies, large and small, have often complained about large discrepancies between their own log files and panel companies’ versions of their traffic. On Thursday, one large tech publisher, with about two million self-reported unique monthly users, told MarketingVOX that the panel companies undercounted his particular type of traffic by almost an order of magnitude. Panel company efforts to get his firm to pay tens of thousands of dollars for services and listings seemed to him to be extortionate.

“All measurement companies that report audience metrics have a material impact on interactive marketing and decision-making,” wrote the IAB. “Therefore, transparency into these methodologies is critical to maintaining advertisers’ confidence in interactive, particularly now, as marketers allocate more budget to the platform.”

In his open letter, IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg writes, “To persist in using panels that potentially undercount or ignore the diverse populations that are the future of consumer marketing is to deny marketers the insights they need to build their businesses. And it certainly appears to us as if these audiences are being undercounted or disregarded.”