Why Ad Buying Terminology Needs Standardization

Because a lot of data is being transferred between companies. We’re trying to reduce friction in the industry.

When we do a campaign with a company, they send us data and it is in a bunch of fields. So for instance, let's talk about the term “publisher.”

What we're trying to do when we evaluate campaigns is we're trying to take data from a whole bunch of different systems and roll them up into one database so that we can analyze and compare the performance of one publisher to another. So there is a lot of combining of data, there might be different tabs on a spreadsheet, there might be different entries in a database, but you're going to combine them all and if we've got a lot of different names, then somebody has to spend a lot of time relabeling.

For a long time, we didn’t have a lot of different data sources. There was Nielsen for television, there was Mediamark Research and Intelligence for print. We didn’t need to extract data from 14 different sources, there was just the one source. Now we’ve got so many different data sources with the web.