14mins

 STARRING 

• Gian Fulgoni, Chairman and co-founder, comScore

As well as popping into see Max during our recent US trip, we also caught up with Gian Fulgoni of comScore in the Chicago office (their HQ is in Virginia where CEO Magid Abraham and much of the engineering team is based).

comScore is one of the main providers of internet measurement and competes with Nielsen Online (formerly Nielsen NetRatings), Compete.com, Hitwise, and Quantcast as well as others. That said, comScore and Nielsen are generally considered the bigger boys of the bunch given how often their share data is cited in the media (e.g. monthly shares in the lucrative online search market).

The internet measurement sector is very technology-hungry. In the early years, comScore literally ate up millions of dollars to get its IT infrastructure established and working right. It has one of world’s largest databases as a result of the oceans of data being sent back daily from panelist PCs (a widget records their internet activity, with their permission, and siphons it, along with detailed transaction data, over to HQ). These efforts were rewarded when, in 2007, comScore was annointed one of 47 technology pioneers at the WEF in Davos.

2007 was arguably a good year for comScore’s initial investors. 2007’s IPO provided for a much-needed liquidation for this band of investors who backed the firm since 2000, including after the dotcom bust when venture financing virtually dried up.

At one point comScore’s market cap hit $1bn; it’s still pretty amazing to think that a company that has only been trading for around seven years is already worth over half as much as TNS, a widely admired and solid growth firm, but one still largely based around traditional research techniques.

In this short chat with Gian, we discuss an area that he’s passionate about: why ad. dollars are only slowly moving online. It’s that old chestnut: online finally commands a significant amount of consumer attention (compared with other media such as tv), and yet still only commands a fraction of the advertising dollars spent on tv and other mass-market media. We also ask him about whether Facebook is worth the reported $15bn, the conversation having taken place shortly after Microsoft made its investment.

comScore is Gian’s second business success. Prior to this, both him and Magid led IRI through a period of rapid growth. And in-between, he found time to invest in Gibsons, a successful steak restaurant in Chicago (which we, of course, had to sample - very yummy!).

Series:MarketingTalk