Fastfood and Adsense Irony

Well, here it is, the study we've all contemplated authoring - juxtaposing fastfood ad-agency images vs. the actual product - with the added irony of contextual text ads automatically selected by Google at the top of the page. Proof that Adwords text ads do indeed have a branding effect? Link to the study here.

Cookie-based Data Likely Overstating Uniques by 150% : Comscore

Comscore released a new cookie study that is pretty strong evidence of the further erosion of the ability to use cookies to track anything unique. President/CEO Dr. Magid Abraham says that with 7% of computers accounting for 35% of all cookies "just one set of 'eyeballs' at the site may be counted as 10 or more unique visitors over the course of a month. The result is a highly inflated estimate of unique visitors for sites that rely on cookies to count their audience." This also goes for adserver counts of unique users that were served an ad. One more observation worth noting is that 3rd party cookies are deleted at no higher rate than 1st party cookies - contrary to a prevailing rule of thumb that holds that users who utilize security programs to keep their PCs clean are more likely to find 3rd party cookies invasive and choose to delete them, as opposed to 1st party cookies set directly by a friendly web site. Bottom line, if the methodology was correct, Comscore shows that many web site and ad server logs can exaggerate the audience by a factor as high as 2.5, or an overstatement of 150 percent.

So Much For BuzzMetrics

Rafat Ali accuses Nielsen's new BuzzMetrics research product of being just so much "hooey" - and provides compelling proof. Buzzmetrics is the “advanced text-mining algorithms"-based “filtered blog buzz” research" developed to measure buzz in the blogosphere, to monitor consumer-generated media, and to provide backup for social media consulting. I'll let you know if Nielsen responds - wonder if they bother to measure their own blog buzz? From Rafat's post on the subject: "We’re among the top 25 blogs discussing “Sanjaya”, according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the “global measurement standard in consumer-generated media”. Well. Funny they mention that, because we haven’t ever written about Sanjaya. American Idol, yes, Sanjaya, zilch. We’re #21 on the list, above Gizmodo (another site I can guarantee never wrote about Sanj). " He goes on: "So let’s stop with this PR glibness, and let’s start developing better ways to measure this." Link to the post on paidContent.org