At the company I work for, iCrossing, we like to say that "if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it." For years, people pooh-poohed measurement because, of course it was nearly impossible to measure what people did after they watched a commercial, or read a story about a product. Ubiquitous computing has changed. People do provide feeback, if you ask, and if you know where to look.

So the news of Nielsen Media launching into tracking not just online, but out-of-home behavior, is more or less extpected. New meters will evolve to track how consumers interact with messaging on mobile devices. They call it A2/M2 which stands for Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement. Now, not only can we measure the post-media experience, but we can measure what customers do while being engaged in the medium. Multi-media-tasking is rising, and we know that people do use mobile phones or go online while watching TV, or while reading a newspaper. Smart advertisers can leverage this, if they engage in what Google calls ‘dayparting.’ That’s the ability to turn on and off keywords, so that searchable keywords are available only at the times the advertiser expects it’s specific target audience to be searching.