This has been an interesting week for digital media. First, there was the IAB’s Ecosystem 2.0 annual conference in Phoenix at which there was a lot of speculation about whether Yahoo! really has a vision, whether a merger with Microsoft make sense and other horse race issues. Meanwhile, Nielsen is struggling with measuring an increasingly fragmented media audience. The New York Times has an excellent article entitled “Nielsen Looks Beyond TV, and Hits Roadblocks”

Despite the skittishness of consumers, Nielsen is pressing ahead with a strategy it calls Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement — or A2/M2. The goal is one day to track media consumption everywhere, much of it from the same people. The broader focus has demanded that the company introduce more consumer panels, and it now runs 16 of them (excluding Project Apollo), up from five panels 10 years ago.

At Yankee Group, we’re big fans of the anywhere concept. Much of our consumer research is founded on the same assumption — that it’s the same people who watch cable TV, catch up with programs online, download other content to portable devices and access other programming on mobile devices. Our work is by no means a replacement for the in-depth measurement the media industry gets from Nielsen, but it’s a common point of departure that we use to develop a vision and roadmap for the future.

I’d like to thank the Academy…

With this in context, I was overjoyed to see an ad campaign from the Emmys announcing the inclusion of internet video in the Primetime Emmys®. Nice work on the creative. It made me smile.

Our internet video analyst is Anton Denissov, and this announcement was made on his birthday. He had the day off, but I can’t think of a better present.