The OVAB Europe Conference ended with a panel discussion on audience measurement. Taking part in the panel were: Olivier Duizabo – Quividi, Etienne Reignoux – Neo Media Group, Brian Dusho – BroadSign and OVAB USA, and Dirk Huelsermann – Neo Advertising and OVAB Europe.

Four main points emerged from the discussion:

- initially the industry should not try to find the best audience currency possible, but rather use one which finds the greatest consensus amongst the various actors involved – buyers (agencies, advertisers…) and sellers (networks, ad sales agencies…). At the moment, the process seems to involve getting everyone together around a table to agree on a definition acceptable to all.

- another challenge will be to persuade network operators to adopt this measurement system, especially if it is more restrictive and shows lower figures than those which have been used up until now.

Brian Dusho remind everyone that similar difficulties were encountered in establishing guidelines in the USA : “it’s tough for many networks in the USA to meet agencies with smaller audience figures than they had in the past. However, by next year, 50% of our members will be using our guidelines.”

- introducing guidelines in Europe may take longer than in the USA, because of the greater diversity of markets across the continent. One of OVAB Europe’s missions will be to try to accelerate this process. And it’s also up to each local market to adapt these guidelines, taking into account its own peculiarities.

- as happened in the early days of the Internet, aggregating networks can help speed up the introduction of advertising. This is happening already in the USA (SeeSaw Networks, Adcentricity, etc…) and companies such as BookingDooh, amongst others, are trying to do the same in Europe.