Susan Whiting of Nielsen Media Research in the WSJ

Susan Whiting, CEO of Nielsen Media Research (which recently unveiled plans for Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement) is interviewed in today's Wall Street Journal, and the piece raises some interesting questions about the continued relevance of Neilsen's basic attention data:

There is an increasing sense in the ad business that the more valuable measures are those that tell marketers and media outlets not how many people saw an ad, but what subset of that larger group remembers and recalls that ad and even goes out and makes a purchase because of it. In that light, are Nielsen's best-known measures--traditional TV ratings--as useful as they were in the past?

Ms. Whiting: Of course, people are using other ways of valuing advertising, and I think that these are complementary, but the baseline has to be an understanding of who is receiving the television program and the commercials, and how that audience is changing... As you see media fragmenting and you see advertisers looking for more accountability in how they are spending money, I think they really need a good understanding of how to reach consumers, and we measure independently the value of the demographics of those audiences. As they are changing very quickly and our measuring changes with them, that independent third-party accountability of an audience, I think, it is even more important. We have been working directly with some very major advertisers and an advertisor advisory council I put together. They have told us we need to keep doing what we are doing with even more quality and precision, because they need that assurance that they can measure the value of that television audience...

Whiting's comments left me feeling that Nielsen is certainly "focused on doing what we are doing with more quality and precision," but also with a sense that there's something missing from this model. It's not the platform--Nielsen is obviously looking well beyond TV and outside the home into other media on other devices.

But systems focused on helping marketers make the next leap in behavioral targeting just aren't that compelling now that we're talking about entirely new ways to connect users with information and consumers with the marketplace. The only way to truly track people "anytime, anywhere" is to enable them to do it for themselves and empower them to control their own data and put itto use for their own purposes.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy nielsen netratings nielsen+media+research anywhere+anytime+media+measurement susan+whiting