JICIMS – Making Progress
Peter Bowman, general manager of JICIMS, provides an update on the latest in the development of an online planning currency…
JICIMS is making progress. The key stakeholders in JICIMS – that’s the Joint Industry Committee for Internet Measurement Systems – are determined to resolve the many outstanding issues on the road to providing both definitive internet user population data and an industry agreed planning system by the end of 2008.
In the middle of last year, MediaTel invited JICIMS to report on progress into 2007. The achievements at that time were structural in nature – we set out how the planning and selling sides of the online sector, as defined by the trade bodies IPA, ISBA, IAB and AOP had set up a jointly owned not for profit company, how a manager had been appointed, and working parties manned by expert representatives of the shareholder bodies were in place.
There was already JICIMS data in the public domain, as the JICIMS Establishment Survey, which is run as a joint venture with the National Readership Survey, had been issuing findings on internet usage patterns since March 2007.
So, last year, I closed my comments by saying that perhaps our hosts would invite JICIMS back, and we would be able to report that we had built on these modest successes.
The best indication of this is that before Easter, JICIMS issued an ‘RFP’ – i.e. a Request for Proposals as to the optimum route towards a planning currency. Why is this an important milestone for JICIMS, and arguably for the online medium as a whole?
Well, it means that representatives of the medium, both planners/buyers and sellers, were able through the second half of 2007 to agree on the basic outline of what an industry agreed database would look like. If we then go through to an appointment of a research contractor on the basis of the RFP process, then it bodes well for the data attaining before too long ‘planning currency’ status.
The second reason to be cheerful is that interest in the RFP initiative has been apparent among current data suppliers. I’m hopeful that a significant number of potential contractors, some very familiar to the UK market, some maybe less so, are mulling over proposals as to the best way of ensuring that the UK is served by relevant and accessible data, especially in the area of pre-campaign planning.
Can we reveal what this ‘currency’ might look like?
JICIMS will be very receptive to a wide range of proposals, but the RFP does include a set of minimum requirements. An online planning currency will have a user centric approach, and will be, as we said earlier, primarily concerned with pre-campaign planning. It will cover only the GB market. Data will be made available continuously and frequently. The main output will be audiences and audience profiles for a significant number of online media, plus it will provide the means to estimate net audiences across a number of sites. But the RFP will not be highly prescriptive, so JICIMS anticipates a range of proposals and approaches from those research organisations submitting.
Our priority is to ensure that home use and use of the internet at work is appropriately measured. But we do not by any means exclude other locations or the measurement of internet access on mobile devices. The ‘internet’ as a medium is arguably much more dynamic, certainly at present, than other media sectors served by the other ‘JICs’. If you start a process like designing an RFP, the medium moves on as you’re consulting on and writing it. Accordingly we have asked for proposals as to how best to incorporate developments ranging from behavioural targeting to IPTV.
Before we close, I want to deal with two more issues – the population data in the JICIMS Establishment Survey, and JICIMS timing plan looking ahead.
It is right and proper for a joint industry undertaking like JICIMS to seek to be definitive. But it has always been a feature of JICIMS that unlike the other JICs, who entered almost virgin quantitative territory in respect to their media sectors a couple of decades or more ago, we are entering a rich, crowded market. JICIMS can’t replace or overrule existing suppliers of internet population data like comScore, Nielsen Online and TGI.net. But you can understand differences between datasets, and on inspection, these can be bridgeable. There has been considerable discussion with these suppliers, for which we are thankful, and JICIMS looks forward to a degree of mutual dovetailing of the various findings as we move forward.
As for the rest of 2008, we expect to receive proposals by mid May. After due deliberation, JICIMS will issue a formal Invitation to Tender (ITT) by the early autumn, with a view to awarding a formal JICIMS contract by the end of 2008.
If JICIMS is invited back to this column 12 months hence, then with a fair wind, that planning database should then be spreading its insights over the online medium.