Ad Execs Want to Track Every Move 
By Joanna Glasner

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,67390,00.html

02:00 AM May. 02, 2005 PT

SAN FRANCISCO -- Marketers are testing new techniques to measure
whether advertisers' messages are getting across, and they are
prepared to spend vast sums and deploy astonishingly complex
technologies to do so.

At the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco last week, advertising
experts contemplated a variety of approaches, ranging from round-the-
clock automated ad tracking to simply reducing the number of ads per
show, that could make it easier for advertisers to reach an
increasingly fragmented viewing public.

To measure the impact of ad campaigns, VNU, the parent company of
television-audience measurement firm Nielsen Media Research, and
Arbitron, the media research firm, are developing an experimental
program called Project Apollo that takes the concept of viewer
tracking to a level of unprecedented detail.

The project, which the companies hope to roll out on a trial basis
next year, will require participants to carry a pager-sized device
that records all advertising messages to which its wearer is exposed.
Participants will also record everything they buy, so that advertisers
can figure out exactly which messages made an impact.

"This fulfills a dream the industry has had for years: the ability to
measure what a consumer is exposed to and their resulting behavior in
the marketplace," said Thom Mocarsky, vice president of communications
at Arbitron.

The companies plan eventually to incorporate data from 30,000 U.S.
households into Project Apollo, Mocarsky said. The planned trial will
include between 4,000 and 6,000 households. In exchange for providing
their data, participants will receive a combination of cash and
products.

But the project involves more than just asking participants to share
their viewing and shopping activities. Project Apollo's creators
intend to electronically record marketing messages to which
participants are exposed by embedding an audio code into ads that can
be automatically picked up by portable devices.

It won't just be television ads, either. Embedded codes may be
incorporated in ads across a range of media, including radio, TV and
in-store loudspeaker systems. In future versions of the project, John
Bosarge, senior vice president at VNU Advisory Services, envisions
including exposure to ads in print media as well, albeit not through
embedded codes.

The end goal, according to Bosarge, is to get a "holistic view of how
consumers are consuming their media." That way, advertisers can have a
better idea how to divide their spending between radio, television and
other types of media.

On its website, Project Apollo uses the example of a working mother to
illustrate how the system might work. The woman is driving home from
her job and hears a commercial for McDonald's on the radio. Afterward,
she takes her daughter out to eat at McDonald's. Project Apollo would
record both the woman's exposure to the ad and her later patronage of
the advertiser.

Such detailed information doesn't come cheap. Bosarge estimated that
the rollout of the full Project Apollo will cost in excess of $100
million. 

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Full article at Wired News ....
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67390,00.html

Cheers, Steve..

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