Nielsen Launches New Tracking Tool

The Nielsen Company this month launched DemoWatch, a new feature of its web-based commercial tracking service KeepingTrac that will allow advertisers to monitor demographic composition of their advertising audiences.

How it works: DemoWatch links the demographic information obtained from Nielsen's overnight television ratings with KeepTrac's commercial monitoring ability to help advertisers and agencies ensure their television commercials are reaching their desired audiences. DemoWatch is also designed to help Nielsen clients adhere to advertising guidelines for children, which would affect primarily advertisers of food, alcohol, prescription drugs and R-rated movies. This way, if they violate the guidelines, they know quickly and can correct the situation.

The commercial tracking system captures commercials that have been encoded with a digital watermark, enabling real-time performance evaluation, which is also valuable for advertisers affected by the childrens' guidelines. DemoWatch actually automates this process.

Advertisers and their agencies already rely on Nielsen for a variety of services that help them accomplish their everyday tasks. Add DemoWatch, and KeepingTrac for that matter, to that list of valuable services. In a world where metrics and accountability are crucial to the success of organizations, these new complementary offerings have launched at the right time--it was very smart for Nielsen to combine the strengths of DemoWatch and KeepingTrac. Nielsen's clients will be able to more easily gauge the potential success of their campaigns while also ensuring they don't break any rules in the process. The immediate accessibility of this information is vital for advertisers and Nielsen has created a service that addresses the time-sensitive needs of its clients. Both DemoWatch and KeepingTrac will likely interest many Nielsen clients and could possibly attract new customers seeking such a solution.

RentBureau Provides Boost to ChoicePoint Data

RentBureau, an online real-time independent repository of apartment rental payment histories, has partnered with ChoicePoint to provide rental payment information to property owners as part of ChoicePoint's resident screening and collection service, Resident Data.

Rent payment data collected by RentBureau from multi-family owners and managers across the U.S. will be linked to Resident Data's database network. Through RentBureau's National Rental Data Exchange (NRDE), Resident Data clients can filter residential applications with their own customized leasing criteria to identify potentially good and bad renters, thus enabling them to make better leasing decisions.

The partnership will also provided Resident Data access to millions of rental payment records available to RentBureau's member property owners and managers, including Equity Residential, Post Properties, BRE, Julian LeCraw & Co., as well as other data partners.

This alliance will definitely make the Resident Data service a more robust one. Customers rely on ChoicePoint to help them manage their risks, so the more complete information they have, the better. It really isn't possible to give customers too much data, as long as that data is relevant to their needs. In this case, combining the resources of RentBureau and ChoicePoint to yield a more complete service just makes sense.

It also seems that it was easier for ChoicePoint to form this partnership than try to acquire such data on its own. It appears that the integration will be fairly smooth, and customers will be able to benefit from this collaboration immediately.

Another IHS Acquisition

Technical information provider IHS Inc. this month acquired the assets of Exploration Data Services of the Gulf Coast (EDS) and its subsidiary, Geodigit LLC. Both maintain and market geological data covering the subsurface Gulf of Mexico. The specific properties acquired by IHS for a purchase price of $6.25 million in cash include EDS's catalog of interpreted formation tops on more than 25,000 offshore wells, www.EDSMaps.com and Geodigit's MMS offshore well data, base maps and other well header data.

According to a press release announcing the deal, the acquisition is in line with IHS' goal to over subsurface coverage of nearly all major oil and gas basins in North America. EDS's coverage of basins in the Gulf of Mexico state and federal waters is expected to blend effectively with IHS databases of well, production, pressure and log data as well as two other acquisitions IHS made earlier this year: Geological Data Services and Geological Consulting Services.

This acquisition certainly makes a lot of sense, as it sufficiently helps IHS expand its coverage in this topic area. If IHS wants to become the ultimate information source for this type of data, it's certainly on the right track. And purchasing assets that are already strong on their own means there will be no learning curve--both IHS and its customers will benefit from the addition of EDS's expertise immediately. The deal is also a win for EDS, which will get the security of a steady parent company in IHS and will garner more interest for its offerings courtesy of an already established IHS customer base. There's still time for IHS to close another related deal before 2007 enters the history books; and it definitely won't be surprising if another key property is added this segment of the business by the end of the year.

Busy Time At WAND

WAND has made a lot of noise lately in the search world. The company recently announced that it has expanded the scope of its taxonomy expertise by creating custom sets of tags and keywords associated with product and service categories. The data can help clients' websites keep up with the Web 2.0 phenomenon by adding metadata to company profiles, blogs, product reviews, catalog pages and video clips. The tags can also yield more intelligent and responsive keyword-based searches of digital assets, according to WAND. The tags can be integrated with the WAND product and service taxonomy to combine benefits of structured and unstructured search.

In separate news, WAND has collaborated with European information services provider Telegate to launch a local search service in Germany. WAND provided more than 180,000 keywords to Telegate's system of 8,000 headings to help users yield the most relevant results from their searches. Prior to working with WAND, Telegate produced failed searches for many of its users.

To solve that problem, WAND matched Telegate's business categories to its taxonomy to produce a large amount of synonyms that could be included in the Telegate database. WAND also analyzed Telegate's query logs to find missed searches and extract additional search terms to include in its taxonomy. Now, more than two out of three searches that previously failed yield relevant results for users.

Both of these announcements certainly illustrate the value of WAND's services in a world where Internet search and Web 2.0 are top of mind with every company that has an Internet-based businesses. Creating a service that helps these companies better handle Web 2.0 technology is a smart move by WAND. Many organizations still don't know how to adapt their sites to take advantage of everything related to Web 2.0 and will likely welcome this helping hand from the experts at WAND. While they can't (or don't want to) do it themselves, they certainly recognize the urgency to have such capabilities. As word continues to get out about this new offering, it will undoubtedly become one of WAND's most popular services.

WAND's partnership with Telegate should also benefit the company in both the long and short term as Web customers of all sizes and locations strive to make their search functionality the best it can be. They realize that users are going to bypass their sites if they can't find exactly what they are looking for, and find it quickly. Having great search functionality on your site is a necessity, not an option, these days. And WAND is certainly well-positioned to capitalize on that trend.

Too Much Information

With all the excitement around user-generated content, and so many new sites launching that depend in large part, if not exclusively, on it, relatively little thought seems to have been given to the question: what if it works?

We were early fans of TripAdvisor a 2004 Model of Excellence award winner. Yet TripAdvisor's phenomenal success came with a hidden price. It is now routinely held up as an example of a data provider that became a victim of its own success. Look up a particular hotel on TripAdivsor and you can find dozens of user reviews. Do they provide information? Yes, lots of it. Do they provide insight? Not really, because they are invariably and passionately contradictory. One person loves the hotel; another had the worst experience of his life. How does a user of the TripAdvisor site extract value from such extreme inconsistency? It's not easy, and it can be frustrating even to try. That's not a good user experience.

Some of the pioneers in user-generated content are acutely aware that user-generated content can quickly turn into user-generated information overload. Yet, discouraging user-generated content is contrary to the business model and editing or policing it creates costs that make the whole model less attractive and more complicated. What's a publisher to do?

One excellent example of how to encourage user- generated content while maintaining its value is provided by review site yelp.com. View a typical hotel review on Yelp and you can click on a "rating details" link that elegantly and instantly summarizes all the dozens of full text reviews that appear below for you to read -- or not.

There's an important underlying lesson here: value is not created by amassing the greatest amount of stuff online. It is created by making information accessible, digestible and actionable. These are some of the tasks routinely performed by data publishers on a daily basis, and it's one of the key reasons that the data publishing business is thriving right now. We are in the right place at the right time with the right skills.