The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Emerging Measurement

With the proliferation of blogs, online video sites, social networking sites, online forums, and other forms of consumer-generated media, marketers have less control over how their brands are discussed and viewed by their target audience. Word of mouth has become increasingly important at the same time that marketers are losing absolute control. As a result, there is a new generation of niche online measurement companies designed to help a company understand its brand’s imprint in these environments.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics

Nielsen BuzzMetrics started as three separate companies that consolidated in 2005, all with similar goals: developing technologies and tools “to help companies measure, understand, and leverage the increasing amount of consumer activity, influence, and content—the ‘buzz’—that was migrating to the internet and new forms of media” (Nielsen BuzzMetrics 2006). BuzzMetrics was founded in 1999 to create technologies that would help companies leverage word-of-mouth activities. Intelliseek was established to help marketers delve into immense amounts of company feedback and consumer-generated content to form real-time measurement of buzz about the brand. The third company, Trendum, developed linguistic analysis technologies. In 2005, the three companies came together through a partnership with VNU, Inc. to form Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Today the company’s objective is to create a new measurement standard for consumer-generated media. The intelligence gleaned ...