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The
Measurement Industry
Measurement
Industry Predictions 2008
Who will split, who will hook up, and what they
will be measuring?
by
Katie Delahaye Paine
1. There
will be more
partnerships between technology companies and traditional research
firms.
Technology companies are quickly learning that pure technology solutions
are not what the customers want. The customers want technology to
bring down the cost, but they still need smart people to interpret
the data
and tell them what to do with it. And not just any smart people,
but smart people who understand data and public relations
and corporate communications.
2. There
will be more partnerships/mergers between European research companies
and U.S. firms.
To gain market share and social media expertise, European firms will
take advantage of the weak dollar and scoop up some of the
smaller, still independent research firms, like Biz360, CARMA and
Umbria.
3. Some
content providers will merge.
If nothing else, exasperated clients will demand that content
providers begin to collaborate to provide a better, unified solution.
At KDPaine & Partners,
we have clients who use four or more different services (Nexis,
Burrelles, CyberAlert and TVEyes) to get their clips,
because
just one of them either misses
too many or produces too many false positives.
4. Peace
on one front or another will prevail.
Even though measuring engagement is where the focus of most marketer's
attention is these days, the battle about how to count eyeballs
correctly continues. Comcast and Nielsen are battling it out
on one front; Compete,
Quantcast and Alexa on another. With luck these wars (and
others) will end in 2008.
5. Some unhappy marriages will end.
There's been a lot of consolidation in the industry in the last
few years, and not all those relationships are entirely satisfying
to either the shareholders, the employees, or the customers.
I predict that at least one recent marriage will wind up in
divorce court in 2008.
6. There
will be more correlations, less causality.
Corporate America's love affair with marketing mix modeling
shows no sign of cooling off, but with the multitude of different
media to
choose from it will be harder and harder to prove causality between
PR and marketing
results. (At least until someone figures out that they have to
add social media measurement to the mix.)
7. Relationships
and engagement will be the new ROI.
Marketers will finally give up on defining the ever-elusive ROI
and instead will begin to measure relationships and engagement.
(Okay, perhaps
I've
had too much Champagne and am hallucinating a bit on this one.)
8. Joe Thornley will solve the social media measurement debate
once and for all.
Actually, I'm just dreaming here, but I do predict that Joe
Thornley's gathering in Toronto next May will make great strides in defining
some parameters for social media. 
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