Using Advertising Budgets Effectively. BTW, That's a Lot of TV Watching!

This recent NY Times article  by Randall Stross says

Consider that the average American household consists of 2.7 persons and contains 2.9 television sets, in front of which we sit for record-setting spells, according to Nielsen figures. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, the typical American watched 142 hours of television monthly, up about five hours from the same quarter the previous year. Internet use averaged more than 27 hours monthly, an increase of an hour and a half, according to Nielsen.

Advertisers follow viewers wherever they happen to be. Online, of course, the healthiest category of advertising is search-related. Google’s revenue, most of which comes from search, was $21.8 billion in 2008, up 31 percent from 2007.

But once that special case is put aside, online advertisers have a stark choice: The first option is placing display ads at very inexpensive rates, thanks to an overabundance of supply, but these disappear in the vast ocean of the Web: some 4.5 trillion display ads were shown to United States Internet users in 2008, according to comScore.

Randall points out that these numbers are driven by the metrics that are today available to advertisers trying to use their budgets effectively in this difficult economy. Web advertising introduced the world to high quality advertising metrics. It seems that emerging advertising media such as DOOH (Digital Out Of Home) advertising are following suit.

OVAB (Out of Home Video Advertising Bureau) is an organization that standardizes metrics for out of home video advertising so that advertisers can make apples with apples comparisons of different ad campaigns. This OVAB compliant report from QuiVidi illustrates the information it provides. OVAB's ,measurement guidelines are here and Bill Gerba has a nice summary here .

But this is not leading to a leveling of the playing field for all DOOH companies. Raffi Vartien posts “12 months from now you won’t be able to get a buy if you can’t quote an OVAB standard measurement.” which says

“They all recognize that 12 months from now you won’t be able to get a buy if you can’t quote an OVAB  standard measurement.”

Sass’ focus on the smaller networks bear repeating. Because the cost of joining OVAB is so high, most if not all of the smaller guys can’t buy in, meaning that greater adoption of the OVAB metrics is hampered. This doesn’t make sense to us. Why not create a low-cost affiliate membership that the smaller guys can get involved with?