While completing my next column for IABC‘s CW magazine, I discovered that media ad monitoring (the business once known as ‘clipping services’) is an incredibly sophisticated area of measurement. Not surprised, now that so much money is being siphoned out of TV advertising. Measurement is the mantra.

So when a company talks of ‘hybrid detection technology’ for the broadcast media, I thought this was another salvo from the jargon meisters who survived the dot-com fallout. Turns out, a company called Fast Channel uses a combo of ‘watermark encoding’ and ‘fingerprint analysis’ to report on which commercial ran on which cable station or network. Very impressive stuff.

Next week I hope to interview a few people from the monitoring agencies. They all use web-based tracking tools for real-time reporting. Stay tuned.

If you have any contacts in this area, please give me a holler here.