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!).

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6mins | Produced @ AQR Trends ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Sean Pillot de Chenecey, Captain Crikey
• Sarah Davies, MD, Henley Centre HeadlightVision

Sean refers to his company, Captain Crikey, as an ‘alternative marketing consultancy’ and listening to this chat with Sarah you certainly get an alternative, highly sceptical view of web 2.0, social networks and Second Life. Listen as Sarah defends some of these exciting innovations from the man who believes that luddites are a “…much maligned set of people.”

Sean also shares the reasons why we should have more Chav representation in agencies.

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Given the inevitable fragmentation of MR-related groups on FB, Ray’s created a group of groups for researchers (i.e a meta group). He is listing all research-related groups and sees it primarily as a place for…

All market, social, and opinion researchers on FaceBook. One list for all of us to be able to post, query, and communicate. Let’s democratize the industry

Now, not everyone has found the Facebook experience useful. Virtual Surveys staffer Karen Scholfield (who happens to be a colleague of Ray), opines here about how the whole thing has frankly been overblown.

Read on… (more…)

It’s been pretty difficult not to have noticed the stampede of people joining Facebook.

The ‘it’ social network of today has featured strongly in the blogosphere lately, first because it opened its doors to everyone, and then opened itself to third-party developers.

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Reuben Steiger, founder and CEO of virtual world agency/consultancy Millions of Us, and former evangelist for Linden Lab, creators of virtual world Second Life, chats with Jess Greenwood of Contagious magazine about…

• The genesis of Reuben’s interest in Second Life
• Coping with the Second Life Liberation Army
• The virtual worlds landscape and the likely impact of Sony’s new virtual world ‘Home’
• Are virtual worlds a reaction to an alienation in real life?

7mins | Recorded @ Wildfire ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

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Sarah Gavin, the communications director for social networking site Bebo, chats about…

• Bebo basics (incl. demographics and business model)
• Recent engagement campaigns with Coca Cola and Hasbro
• Future developments, incl. their new mobile service and Kate Modern - Bebo’s take on LonelyGirl15 (and done by the same team)

5mins | Recorded @ Wildfire ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

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