Startup Chatter by Donna Bogatin

comScore is at it again!

CEO Magid Abraham was publicly chastised last year by Randal Rothenberg, CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau, for his firm’s out-of-date and non-transparent methodologies. On behalf of member interactive media companies and advertising agencies, Rothenberg demanded third party audits of comScore’s methods.

Last week, the comScore Chairman, Gian Fulgoni, faced rebuke for his “cookie deletion” crusade at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) conference in New York City, while leading a panel on online advertising. Panelist Patrick Keane, ex-Googler and now CBS Interactive exec, disagreed with Fulgoni’s 30% cookie deletion assertion, underscoring that comScore undercounts publisher traffic.

At the OMMA Behavioral conference earlier in the year, Peter Horan, CEO, IAC Search & Media, told me comScore’s 30% cookie deletion assertions wildly overstate publisher reality, which he indicated to be in the “low single digits” range.

The most recent controversy over comScore’s non-transparent methodology and fuzzy “data” sparked a steep decline in GOOG. The comScore CEO hurriedly came to Google’s defense, despite his own purported credo that he must “maintain comScore’s standing as an objective, third-party measurement standard and cannot appear to endorse one client over another.”

Now, a comScore board member, Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, high-fives Abraham’s latest agenda-driven, non-transparent “data” show, in a non-transparent post of his own. The supposed comScore “study,” that Wilson points to is simply the typical comScore generalization and editorializing of in-house “data” that is not adequately disclosed for professional assessment of its reliability.

The comScore CEO will have the world take his word–based on a single unidentified “retailer“ and an uncertain method for determining precise online-offline cause and effect–about “hidden returns” ripe for the online advertising taking.

Abraham’s comScore partner, Fulgoni, touted the same theory for his ARF presentation, hailing Yahoo and Google sponsored comScore “studies” supposedly proving that search engine marketing CPCs are undervalued to the whopping tune of 80%, thanks to online-offline latencies.

Nevertheless, coveted brand marketers are NOT “emboldened,“ as comScore, Google, Yahoo, so ardently desire.

READ MY REPORT: EX-GOOGLERS BUST GOOGLE SEM BRAND BATTLE

If comScore board members and the comScore executive suite are so gung ho on the data they tout, they ought to release it to the public for scrutiny: I asked Magid Abraham to do just that, as we partied together at the ARF evening bash.

It is particularly unconscionable that comScore “data” publicly fueled GOOG moves, while the public had no concrete knowledge of the real “data” behind the public “reports” of the non-public comScore client-only reports.

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