Associations Working on Audience Data Quality 'Label'

In the US, the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) have linked up with fifteen DMA member companies to develop, test and adopt standards for audience data quality and transparency.

The initiative, which is being spearheaded by DMA's Council for Data Integrity, is designed to help marketers, agencies, data providers and publishers identify and make better decisions on high-quality, responsibly-sourced data. DMA aims to deploy a standard 'data label' - much like an FDA-approved nutrition label - that displays data segment 'ingredients' in a transparent fashion. Its goal is to release a proof-of-concept data quality label before year-end that discloses source, collection, segment methodology, recency and cleansing specifics, as well as compliance signals for industry self-governance and global regulatory standards.

Scott McDonald (pictured), President and CEO of the ARF, comments: 'The quality of insights and the effectiveness of targeting is directly related to the integrity of data received from third party suppliers. We felt it essential to work with the DMA and CIMM to ensure that the advertising community has transparency into the information they are using as a fundamental basis for the sound advancement of research'.

Web sites: www.thedma.org , www.thearf.org and www.cimm-us.org .