Measurement Industry Predictions 2008

The Measurement Industry

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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