UKOM’s objective is to set and govern a credible industry standard for online audience measurement.

This means quantifying audiences in terms of people, not browsers or machines

In an era when there’s so much focus on the potential of automated systems and programmatic advertising, there is, in some quarters, an assumption that machine-driven data will go a long way towards meeting advertiser needs.

In many cases, though, this isn’t true.

People matter. Media and marketing is still about changing people’s perceptions or driving actions.

It is therefore UKOM’s policy to select a provision partner who can deliver a hybrid approach – harnessing machine-driven analysis but also delivering audience data from a people panel, representative of the UK population in terms of gender, social demographics and regionality.

This gives us the best of both worlds.

A people panel will never be large enough to derive a picture of all activity in the digital universe – and may be particularly limited when it comes to specialist channels, niche sites and some less popular apps.

A tag-based census network solution makes sure we have this ‘long tail’ covered. When this is allied to a people panel we are able to deliver demography and interest based audience segmentation for the entire UK online population.

In summary, media and marketing is about communicating with people and UKOM places people at the heart of measurement.