Jon Gibs, VP, Media Analytics of Nielsen Online took his three-minute panel slot to do a rant about how online advertising is broken.  He’s right.  What consumers want online is interaction and relevant content.  What advertisers must provide is quality story telling. Most do not.  The fact is that a banner ad is not an effective opportunity for storytelling. However, online video, social networks, blog comment forums, reader ratings, polls and product reviews are interactive.   These interactions across subscribers tell stories.  That is what is missing from online advertising.  Jon believes that we have the power to correct that and create meaningful opportunities for readers and advertisers.

Jon says that our history is on counting, not accountability.  We have lots of data, but we don’t have a way to measure the true impact of our advertising and promotions.  Jon encourages us to think about how we measure post-buy – in order to move from an impression and click-based focus to a time-based measure.  Look at the amount of time that someone spends with the ad itself and then later with the website and other branded destinations.  He suggests that analysis by time spent per ad, per subscriber will quickly highlight which publishers are slicing up the time spent into small ad pieces and which publishers are actually engaging subscribers with a smaller number of advertisements per visit.

I like where Jon is going here, but of course this approach requires either a bit investment in Nielsen-like research or a subscriber level data integration between publisher and advertiser’s email, web analytics and eCRM systems.  Both are possible, but not commonly available today.  What sort of things can publishers do today to begin to make this relevant?  Three ideas:  Provide session length data in addition to impressions.  Change the focus from clicks to subscriber profile.  Allow advertisers to own deeper experiences within  the editorial, rather than just hanging on the edges.