With the rapid rate of expansion in the advertising industry, it’s no surprise many companies are experiencing growing pains.

A recent survey found that four in 10 CMOs feel “unprepared” to meet modern campaign objectives. An even greater percentage (7 of 10) said they fully expect a dramatic overhaul in corporate marketing within the next five years. Many marketers are working tirelessly to revamp processes and realign strategies around multichannel opportunities designed to drive higher revenues and improve efficiency.

In recent weeks there has been substantial debate about fraud in the advertising industry. Of course, these conversations aren’t new. Click fraud lawsuits have been a near constant for almost a decade.

In 2009, the Wall Street Journal wrote an in-depth report about hidden ads, prompting the formation of an industry group, StopAdFraud.org, which for a time attempted to create a blacklist of offenders in order to curtail the number of publishers enabling click fraud or low-quality impressions. More recently, there have been widely-reported organized click fraud rings – mostly originating from China and Russia in the form of “Botnets” – that involve tens of thousands of IP addresses visiting hundreds of domains and clicking millions of digital ads. Among our clients, which include large and small advertisers, agencies and ad networks, approximately 16 percent of monthly clicks are invalid – roughly half the industry average aided by sophisticated blocking lists that have been assembled to weed out known offenders over several years. While a 100 percent block rate is impossible, this number is still much too high.

So…my last two posts on attribution systems (MMA and VisualIQ ) were among the least popular ever, right down there with Marketing Lessons from Chernobyl (which, let’s face it, was in pretty poor taste). But vox populi isn’t always vox Dei, eh? I think it’s an important topic, so here we go again. 

The lucky recipient of that less-than-stirring introduction is Adometry, which in no way deserves any disrespect. From humble beginnings in click fraud prevention, they have grown in recent years to be one of the leaders in algorithmic response attribution. Their latest expansion moves them beyond digital channels to offline media including direct mail, television, and print. They have also moved from attributing past results to using predictive models to optimize current and future campaigns. Impressive.

Measurement is a topic that has been top of mind for digital advertisers for what seems like ages, and as more advertising dollars shift online, it is only growing in importance. Advertisers have always trusted their guts when it comes to connecting with consumers. But, how do we really know that works? Enter data science. The numbers are out there to tell us if campaigns are truly effective, and it's sparking a debate over the end of intuition. Has the time finally arrived for us to let computers tell us what people respond to and connect with most, or do we still need to trust our instincts?

In tech, everything moves quickly. So quickly, that there are times when a topic gains so much steam that the nomenclature and hyperbole used to discuss the topic are effectively separated from the technology that enabled it (see, “Cloud Computing,” “Big Data” and “SoLoMo”). The latest, persistent example in the ad industry is the ongoing debate about online tracking, a topic that includes increasingly muddled discussions around specific technologies, preferences and implementations including do-not-track signals, consumer choice and third-party cookies.

Startups that have made their mark helping businesses understand the return on their online advertising spending are bringing their technologies into traditional advertising channels, like television and print. While the effort could be quite lucrative--online advertising represents only a fraction of the total ad market--it brings with it new technological challenges and new competitors.

It was 20 years ago when a now-defunct Silicon Valley law firm placed the first clickable banner ad on Global Network Navigator (an early publisher sold to AOL in 1995). In these last 20 years, we’ve seen big changes in ad technology, fueled by a combination of visionary marketers and advancing technical capabilities. Some of these advances are shown on the accompanying timeline.

In the early stages of your company, you might need to bootstrap your marketing plan to build your brand. But as your company grows, you should invest more dollars to advance your sales and marketing efforts so you can better understand your customer base.

In order to target your customers, you need to analyze their behavior both online and offline. Before a customer makes a purchase, he or she can have several touchpoints with a brand through print, TV, or banner ads, but how do you evaluate the performance of each media channel?

Today, we asked our panel of industry experts: “What will be the implications of Mozilla’s intention to block third-party cookies by default in Firefox 22. Here's how they responded:

One of the most complex challenges facing marketers is trying to measure and understand the impact offline or online marketing has on purchases, regardless of where they take place.

A classic example of this challenge is the difficulty in understanding the value of direct mail: Does it influence a customer to go online and make a purchase there, or ultimately in a store? How can one track it accurately? To truly understand the impact of the entire marketing mix, businesses need to understand what advertisements those buyers were exposed to before making a purchase.

Real-time bidding—serving up display ads from a winning bidder within milliseconds directly to a targeted prospect—promises to reach mainstream maturity this year.

In 2012, big data evolved from computational experiment to strategic investment. Successful CMOs now embrace big data analytics because they understand its impact on their organizations.

Adometry has raised $8 million  in new funding from its existing investors as it and other startups see a chance to help companies put a value on their online and offline advertising efforts.

The debate around multi-channel attribution is perhaps the essential marketing problem of this decade. Can you really optimize ad spend on a cross-channel basis, and at the impression level? Not yet. Will you be able to? A lot of smart money says yes, but it’s going to be a long and bumpy ride.

As marketers advertise in more and more digital channels, more and more marketers need ways to gauge the value of those channels and calibrate their media spend proportionately. To do that, they need cross-channel attribution technologies, which are sorely lacking (as anyone checking out an industry conference will be surely attest). Cross-channel ad attribution firm Adometry has raised an $8 million funding round in hopes of pushing the business forward.

Texas-based marketing analytics firm Adometry has secured an $8 million round of financing to fund recruitment and expansion into new territories.

The round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures. In addition to the funds, Jason Pressman of Shasta Ventures will join the company’s board of directors.

Facebook’s introduction on Tuesday has, not surprisingly, elicited a flurry comments from interested Internet parties. Here’s what a few of them had to say.

As the page turns on another year, industry leaders provide their comments and predictions on what the future of online advertising holds for 2013, including Paul Pellman's thoughts on why big data reigns supreme. 

It’s a common refrain that last click attribution is broken, but what should replace it has yet to be resolved. Algorithmic attribution modeling is perhaps the leading candidate, and vendors such as Visual IQ, Convertro, and Adometry are competing to provide solutions in this area. But these attribution specialists still struggle to make fractional attribution data available to marketers in ways that are actionable on their ad buying platforms of choice, without giving away too much data to those platforms.

Mobile devices present an opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers anywhere in the world at any time. While marketers can sense the impact of the mobile revolution, there's no scientific evidence to indicate whether mobile advertising drives conversions -- and if so, how? A recent poll of participants in an MMA webinar on mobile advertising found that 48% of marketers feel that measurement is their biggest challenge in new media platforms. It is likely due to this lack of confidence that mobile advertising only represents an average of 5% of advertisers’ total media spend (according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report), in spite of the massive uptick in mobile use.

Direct response marketers spend a lot of time trying to analyze whether their online ad campaigns are getting people to click and buy. But linking these efforts to transactions that happen on the sales floor remains difficult. Analytics firms and digital marketing agencies alike are scrambling to help them, including ad analytics firm Adometry. The Austin, Texas-based company recently announced a partnership with LiveRamp, a company that focuses on getting offline data, such as lists of car purchasers, into online systems.

We all understand the imperative of serving the right ad, with the right message, at the right time to a brand’s intended audience. It’s one of the mantras of marketing today. Marketers themselves understand better than anyone the brands they represent and the audiences they need to reach. But marketers can work more efficiently and effectively with insights gained from advanced attribution about the right time to reach that audience, and even about what the right message looks like.

Adometry, Inc., the leader in cross-channel attribution, today announced a strategic partnership with LiveRamp, the business that enables companies to make their offline data actionable in online advertising. The integration of LiveRamp's powerful offline-online data matching solution with Adometry Attribute(TM) finally gives marketers the ability to see the impact their cross-channel efforts have on total purchases, not just online purchases, thus generating significantly improved optimization.

Adometry, Inc., the leader in cross-channel attribution, today announced that Booyah Advertising, a full service digital agency, is measuring the effectiveness and optimizing customer cross-channel ad campaigns using Adometry Attribute™. The decision to provide advanced attribution technology to clients is fueled by requests from Booyah customers such as Dish Network, Blockbuster, Manilla and others to better understand how various campaign elements were performing and impacting each other.

The fallacy of the current, and increasingly antiquated, last-click standard is that it assumes that if any media touch point is in the path of a conversion, it deserves a share of credit. There is a fundamental difference between causality and correlation, and only an advanced attribution approach can adequately uncover that difference.

Every election year, the topic of dirty attack ads comes up. Pundits chastise candidates about the advertisements and everyone agrees that politics would be better if candidates focused on positive messages. Yet negative political ads live on despite the finger-wagging. Why? Because campaigns have looked at the history of attack ads and carefully monitored their results using very sophisticated approaches. And the data shows they work.

In an effort to maximize conversion rates, today’s online marketers take advantage of myriad channels and ad types to reach their customers. They also employ a number of cross-channel strategies to reach users at more moments of purchase consideration, increasing awareness and the probability of conversion -- but that also makes managing and optimizing campaigns increasingly complex. This leads advertisers to wonder, “How much is too much?”

This Thursday at the Measuring the Cross-Channel Customer Experience with Advanced Attribution webcast, John Dietz, Vice President of Products at Adometry, Inc. will lead a discussion with guest speaker Tina Moffett, Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. to reveal how marketers can understand and optimize the multiple parts of their marketing campaigns that are driving conversions, both online and offline, using a data-driven, advanced attribution solution. Dietz and Moffett will point out the differences between the various attribution methodologies and why they're not all created equal. They'll also explain how to get started with an advanced attribution solution, including pitfalls to avoid, best practices and the top three things to look for when choosing an advanced attribution vendor.

This Wednesday at The Attribution Revolution event in New York, Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry, Inc., recently named a leader in advanced attribution by The Forrester Wave™: Interactive Attribution Vendors, Q2 2012, will join a panel of executives from leading vendors to discuss today's probing questions in media measurement. Providing real-life examples of advanced attribution done right, Pellman will demonstrate how Adometry effectively addresses the challenge of measurement as companies seek to understand and assign values associated with complex cross-channel campaigns.

Adometry, Inc., the leader in cross channel attribution and ad verification, today announced that ideeli has chosen Adometry Attribute™ to measure and improve the performance of advertising campaigns across display, email, search and social online marketing channels. With more than 5 million members and over 1,000 brand partners, ideeli is one of the fastest-growing online retailers in the U.S. By leveraging the Adometry solutions, it is maximizing conversions with its cross-channel advertising campaigns.

"Our customers are savvy online shoppers, so it is important to us that we are reaching the right people, at the right time and in the right place to elicit a positive response from consumers," said Dan Kirchgessner, Director of Advertising at ideeli. "Working with Adometry, we're leveraging the most advanced attribution and ad verification technology available to help us quickly understand what's working so we can optimize our media spend and improve the consumer's experience with our campaigns. We are seeing a substantial impact that display has on member sign-ups, first time purchases and repeat purchases."

This Wednesday at the Data-Driven Strategic Marketing webcast sponsored by the AMA and ThinkVine, Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry, Inc., will join a panel of industry leaders led by Forrester Research to discuss how marketers can successfully develop integrated cross-channel marketing strategies. Providing examples of advanced attribution done right, Pellman will explain how Adometry effectively addresses the challenges of cross-channel campaign measurement, changing consumer behaviors and organizing marketing departments to collaborate with agencies, cross-channel attribution providers and marketing mix optimization providers.

Media planners have traditionally relied on measurements such as clicks and unique visitors to guide their online buys, says Adometry vice president of products John Dietz. But a combination of shifts in the metrics used, as well as frequency capping within and across ad networks, can significantly boost their programs’ effectiveness. Dietz discusses his theories and research with Chief Marketer.

Top Industry Experts From Google, Adobe, Adometry and C3 Metrics To Debate Hot Topic. 

Magnetic, the leader in search retargeting, announced today The Attribution Revolution (www.attributionrevolution.com), an upcoming event that will provide a deep dive into the probing questions that surround media measurement in today's digital age. Presented by Magnetic, the live event will feature a panel discussion comprised of some of the greatest minds in digital ad measurement, providing an opportunity for attendees to engage with the experts.

The purchase funnel -- aka the marketing, conversion, or sales funnel -- has long been the backbone of traditional marketing programs. First introduced in 1898, it depicts the theoretical journey that consumers take from their initial exposure to a brand to their becoming first time and ultimately repeat customers. The original purchase funnel, or the AIDA model, characterizes this journey as a series of four stages: awareness, interest, desire and action. Since its initial adoption, the funnel has been updated to include CRM concepts such as loyalty and advocacy, and to address the maturation of buyers’ behavior over the last century, but the concept has largely withstood the test of time.

This Wednesday at OMMA Data & Targeting in Los Angeles, Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry, Inc., the leader in advanced attribution and online media verification technology, will join a panel of executives from leading vendors to discuss the evolution and advancement of attribution strategies and technology. Providing real-life examples of advanced attribution done right, Pellman will demonstrate how Adometry effectively addresses the challenge of measurement as companies seek to understand and assign values associated with complex cross-channel campaigns.

There are multiple touch points in any marketing campaign. A customer may have seen a few display ads, clicked on a social link, searched a website and read several email marketing messages before making a purchase. John Dietz, VP-products at Adometry Inc., said his company typically sees about four to 10 touch points before conversion; yet most companies attribute the last touch as the one that helped convert a prospect to a customer.

In the week leading up to the Facebook IPO, news broke that General Motors was pulling $10 million in display advertising from the world’s largest social network due to poor performance. But after digging into the story a little deeper, one thing became clear: There seemed to be an issue with how GM was measuring its display advertising campaign performance.

Adometry and Empower MediaMarketing have partnered to help advertisers reach target audiences across online, social, e-mail, video and mobile channels.

Peter Norwood discusses validating attribution models with data-driven metrics.