OSCA online standards campaign for advertising - 10/2001

A campaign has been initiated by netimperative.com to encourage the active participation of the UKs Internet industry in developing common standards and best practice.

OSCA is not an industry body, but rather an attempt to open up debate in the broader market, to ensure that existing industry bodies have access to the opinions of as wide a proportion of the UK Internet market as possible. osca.netimperative.com, where the results of the campaignís initial survey, news, features, opinion pieces and discussion forums will be hosted. The aim of the campaign, supported by market leaders such as Guardian Unlimited, Lycos Europe, Sports.com, WebOptimiser and Lateral, is to galvanise the industry to take a more active role in the development of standards and best practice for all.

OCSA was launched on the back of an industry survey, run from the netimperative.com site, asking the industry for their views on where things lie. With a response rate of 8%, it is clear that this is an issue of the moment within the market. Copies of the full report are downloadable from the OSCA site, but the headline data is as follows;

Over 80% of the respondents felt that it was extremely or very important to establish standards for measurement online.

Over 70% felt it is extremely or very important to establish standards for measuring the effectiveness of online advertising.

Over 70% of respondents felt that 3rd party auditing was extremely or very important, although only 1/3 of site owners state that third parties audit their traffic.

Most interestingly, over 50% of respondents within the industry felt that existing availability of reliable website traffic information is poor or very poor, and an even higher percentage responded that reliable information on advertising effectiveness is poor or very poor.

Simon Waldman of Guardian Unlimited made the point that the industry is young and struggling to grow but warned that dangers lie in an external perception of the Internet as a fragmented, bickering community. Wayne Arnold of Profero continued this by insisting that the industry get active. Currently we have third party auditing (which carries its own problems) and panel-based research, which is frequently considered to consist of too small numbers to effectively cover such a fragmented market. More importantly, it fails to address the issue of work usage, a primary driver of UK Internet use. Ross Sleight of Zhong polled the audience and discovered that everyone attending felt that a combination of site-centric and user-centric data is vital in understanding this developing market ñ the challenge is working out how this should be done. The first step towards achieving this is to open up the debate.

osca.netimperative.com