12年前的2002年，也就是谷歌上市前的一年，时任传媒巨头维亚康姆公司（Viacom）CEO的梅尔•卡马金造访了谷歌公司（Google）的总部。卡马金是一个传奇广告销售人（此君可以说是《广告狂人》中的唐•德雷伯的真人版），他在谷歌总部会见了谷歌的“三巨头”埃里克•施密特、拉里•佩奇和谢尔盖•布林。撮合这次会面的是在业内备受信任、人缘极好的艾伦公司（Allen and Company）风投家南茜•佩雷茨曼。

    谷歌的团队在这次会见中向卡马金解释了网络搜索广告的收费机制，也就是说，只有当有人点击了一幅广告，广告主才需要向谷歌付费。据《纽约客》（New Yorker ）记者、《被谷歌：我们所知的世界末日》（Googled: The End of the World As We Know It）一书的作者肯•奥雷塔描述，卡马金被这次演示震惊得目瞪口呆。最后，他总算意识到，谷歌将对按次收费的电视和广告业形成多么重大的威胁，不禁恼羞成怒。

    当时，卡马金用这样一句话对谷歌三巨头概括了传统媒体和数字媒体之间越来越紧张的关系：

    据奥雷塔的书说，卡马金当时说的是：“你们他妈的是用这种魔法胡搞呢！”

    大概没有一句话能比卡马金的这句美国国骂更能形象地反映传统媒体界的敌意了。卡马金提供了充足的解释以支持自己的观点，奥雷塔也一丝不苟地将它全部记录在了自己的书里。

    “你要想在‘超级碗’上买一个广告位，就得付250万美元的场地费。我不知道这个广告能带来多大效益。你得自己掏钱，自己承担风险。”

    对于按点击量收费，卡马金是这样评论的：

    “这是世界上最糟糕的一种业务模式。你不会想让人们知道什么才是有效益的。如果他们知道了什么才是有效益的，那么到时候你收的费用肯定不如你卖气氛、卖神秘感的时候多。”

    除了搜索业务，谷歌另一个最显著的遗产就是，整个公司都痴迷于基于数据的决策。在谷歌的智力和战略的影响下，我们已经习惯对任何事都用数据衡量一番。今天人们就连跑步时也得揣着一个计步器，对投资无疑也要做衡量，就连看一场球都有人建立“先进”的统计方法对两队分析来分析去。你和你的同事是不是也经常谈论应该怎么样衡量这个会议或那个会议的效果？

    谷歌几乎什么都衡量，全世界也在跟风。你还不信？那你不妨想想全球最老牌的传媒公司之一的尼尔森公司（Nielsen）所发生的变化。

    尼尔森一直被视为一家权威评级机构，它的评级甚至可以左右一些企业和职业的生死。但互联网的崛起杀了尼尔森一个措手不及，给康姆斯克（Comscore）这样的后起之秀创造了空间。在日新月益的数字时代经历了一番垂死挣扎后，尼尔森公司于2006年被几家私募股权公司联手私有化，并且挖来了通用电气（General Electric）传奇人物大卫•卡尔霍恩担任CEO。2009年，卡尔霍恩又将麦肯锡媒体业务的高级合作人史蒂夫•哈斯克招至麾下，彻底重组尼尔森的评级业务，使之适应数字时代的要求。

    五年后，尼尔森公司重新崛起为数字时代的弄潮儿。尼尔森的企业战略仍然不变：继续做视频广告行业的第三方衡量标准（全球视频广告行业的市值高达2120亿美元）。但科技的进步促使这家拥有40000名员工的大公司不得不做出一些重大的变革——毕竟30年前美国只有4个频道，20年前只有30个频道，10年前已经有了300个频道，而如今的视频节目已经遍地开花。

    全球视频广告有压倒性的比例都被企业买来投放在传统的电视节目上。几十年来，每次尼尔森的收视率评级一出，无数广告主都会垂头丧气。

    哈斯克和他的团队采取了两大举措建立更精确的数据。

    首先，尼尔森公司与Facebook、Twitter和益百利（Experian）等公司建立了深厚的数据合作关系，使他们的报告大大提高了精确度。在几大原始大数据公司之中，尼尔森公司通过与Facebook展开合作，整合了大量的新数据组，包括通过访问Facebook的12亿用户的个人资料来确定调查样本的年龄、性别和地理位置。尼尔森仍然保持着它的代表性样本（虽然这个概念经常被批评者诟病），但是他们现在改为通过一系列合作伙伴来确定代表性样本。

    A decade ago, in the year before Google went public in 2003, then-Viacom (VIA) CEO Mel Karmazin, a legendary (if not Don Draper-like) ad salesmen, visited Goole's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex. Nancy Peretsman, the deeply connected and trusted Allen and Company investment banker, had set up the meeting between Karmazin and the Google management troika of Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.

    At that session, the Google team explained how cost per click worked for the veteran outdoor, radio, and television salesman. Google (GOOG) advertisers only paid when somebody clicked on their ad. According to Ken Auletta, longtime New Yorker media correspondent and author ofGoogled: The End of the World As We Know It, Karmazin was dumbfounded by the presentation. Eventually he grew angry as he realized how threatening Google was to the historically under-measured television and radio industries.

    At that point, Karmazin turned to Google founders and summarized the growing tensions between traditional and digital media:

    "You guys are fucking with the magic," Karmazin said, according to Auletta's book.

    Perhaps no sentence better encapsulates the defensiveness of the traditional media business more than Karmazin's colorful observation. The executive provided ample commentary to support his thesis through additional quotes that Auletta meticulously documents in his book.

    "You buy a commercial in the Super Bowl, you're going to pay $2.5 million for the spot. I have no idea if it's going to work. You pay your money, you take your chances."

    On the topic of pay per click, Karmazin concluded:

    "That's the worst kind of business model in the world. You don't want to have people know what works. When youknow what works you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you're selling this mystique."

    While synonymous with the search business, perhaps Google's most significant legacy will be its organizational obsession with data-driven decision-making. Google's intellectual and strategic impact has encouraged the measurement of -- well -- everything. Today we count our steps, measure our investments, and create "advanced" statistics for our sports. How often do you and a colleague talk about how to measure the effectiveness of that deck, this meeting, or that conference?

    Google measures everything; the world has followed. Still not convinced? Consider how Nielsen (NLSN), among the world's oldest media companies, has changed.

    Long known as the official ratings firm, companies and careers have lived or died based on Nielsen's ratings. The Internet caught the company by surprise, creating room for upstarts like Comscore (SCOR). Struggling to contend with the rapidly changing landscape in digital, Nielsen was taken private in 2006 by a collection of private equity shops that eventually recruited General Electric (GE) legend David Calhoun as CEO. In 2009, Calhoun hired Steve Hasker, the top partner in McKinsey's media practice, to reinvent the Nielsen's measurement service for the digital age.

    Five years later, Nielsen has emerged as a digital trailblazer. The corporate strategy remains intact: Be the third-party measurement standard for the global $212 billion video advertising industry. However, technology has forced significant changes for the 40,000-person firm, given that there were only a mere four channels 30 years ago; 30 channels 20 years ago; 300 channels 10 years ago; and video programming everywhere today.

    The overwhelming share of global video advertising is purchased for traditional television programming. Nielsen's ratings have been the subject of frustration for decades of television history.

    Hasker and his team undertook two major initiatives to create more precise numbers.

    First, Nielsen created deep data partnerships with Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR), and Experian to make their panel reporting considerably more accurate. Among the original big data companies, Nielsen integrated massive new data sets by negotiating a Facebook partnership that validates the age, gender, and location of their panelists by accessing Facebook's 1.2 billion profiles worldwide. Nielsen maintains its representative panels (a notion that critics continue to loathe), but they now validate panelists with a variety of partnerships.

    其次，哈斯克今年4月在纽约大学（New York University）曾表示，尼尔森公司耗时4年建立的一种新的视频收视率衡量标准现在已经进入收尾阶段。这是一种可以跨媒体、跨设备衡量观众的数量规模和参与程度的毛收视率（GRP）标准。以往各大电视公司更容易认同这种收视率标准以建立某种第三方的确认机制。但是现在，靠广告和娱乐节目生存的老牌电视公司已经受到了来自科技行业的新进者的挑战。现在，毛收视率（GRP）的计算与谷歌、奈飞（Netflix）和苹果（Apple）这类公司同样利益攸关。尤其是凭借全球热门视频网站YouTube，谷歌在这个问题上有相当大的利害关系。

    谷歌的创始人团队热爱数据，藐视一些无法衡量的东西。他们之所以研究出付费搜索广告的机制，很大程度上就是由于拉里•佩奇和谢尔盖•布林绝对不会允许Google.com的网站上出现一张横幅广告。这么敏感的一群人怎么可能容忍传统收视率在统计上的不严密，于是冲突就产生了。谷歌、Facebook乃至整个互联网产业都坚决认为，网友们看过的每一个视频都应该被计算到收视率里，从而挑战了传统电视的效果。

    从传统上看，尼尔森公司最重要的客户就是各大电视公司与他们的广告主。尼尔森公司要想重新站稳脚跟，就需要一个公认的GRP标准来维持它在衡量全球视频收视率方面的主导地位。尼尔森公司服务的是一个市值上万亿美元的巨大市场，为了取得这个市场上的利益相关方的共识，尼尔森已经花了好几年的时间进行产品开发和外交公关。

    无数批评人士一直指责尼尔森公司过于依赖来自各大电视网的费用，因此他们的收视率不可信。奥雷塔今年二月来纽约大学在我的课上做主题为“互联网媒体的历史”的客座讲座时，着意强调了他对尼尔森收视率的正当性的关注，而且他还拿尼尔森公司同样具有高度争议性的DVR收视率指标作为尼尔森安于在电视行业里挣钱的另一个例子。

    两个月后，我问哈斯克对奥雷塔的观察有什么看法，他的回答好像是在打太极。他说，虽然很多人可能不想相信尼尔森公司，但广告主们对尼尔森公司的信任程度超过了任何一家传媒公司。

    最后，他表示，广告市场仍然需要一名“裁判员”，也就是衡量服务。投资人们普遍相信穆迪或标准普尔的债务评级，美国环保署（EPA）对汽车燃油功率的衡量结果也受到大家认同。哈斯克还表示，尼尔森公司对一个广告是在NBC上还是Twitter上、是在有线电视上还是在移动媒体上播放并没有既定的偏好和利益，尼尔森公司只想衡量这些视频节目和视频广告是否有人收看，收看的人是谁。

    尼尔森的变革对电视行业的影响是很大的。尼尔森公司已经重新设计了GRP的计算规则，而这个标准曾经是电视市场称霸媒体界的资本之一。如果电视继续通过具有高度沉浸感的广告聚拢大量观众的话，那么投到《海军罪案调查处》（NCIS）、《美国好声音》（The Voice）以及其它众多电视节目上的钱就仍然难以流向别的地方。

    但是通过与一系列数据供应商的合作，尼尔森给人的感觉和它的行动越来越像一家互联网公司，而且它衡量的精确性也在显著提高。如今，这家公司正准备在持续演化的视频传播环境下，凭借一个公认的GRP标准，去衡量成百上千万台设备背后的几十亿观众的行为。

    如今的媒体环境呈指数级碎片化，看电视的观众群有可能会日益萎缩。（事实上，几十年来看电视的人数一直减少。）企业的市场部门要想证明一次性预付的广告采购开支能产生预期效益很不容易。因为随着数码设备变的五花八门，视频传播渠道越来越多，这些视频内容被观众看到的时间也将是有先有后，而不像前互联网时代，大家都在同一时间看到电视的内容。

    科技投资人马克•安德里森曾写道：“软件正在吞噬世界。”随着视频内容行业发展到一个临界点，软件现在也要开始吃掉电视广告了。消费者可以在数码设备上通过几百万个渠道看视频。尼尔森必须衡量每一股数据流，而且广告主们最终也会获得他们真正想要的东西。将来，广告将可以使用算法、数据和外币来购买。

    而梅尔•卡马金的那种传奇的广告销售技巧，终将像分类广告和大家书架上的CD一样，成为明日黄花。（财富中文网）

    本文作者艾伦•科恩是Yashi公司的营销总监。Yashi是一家位于新泽西州的广告科技公司。同时，他也是纽约大学的兼职教授，主讲互联网媒体史。

    译者：朴成奎

    Second, according to Hasker in an April talk at New York University, Nielsen is nearing the conclusion of a four-year odyssey to set measurement standards for video -- a kind of Gross Rating Point (GRP) across all media and devices that measures the size and engagement of the viewing audience. In the past, television networks have more easily agreed to standards in order to create third-party validation mechanisms. But the old boy networks that exist on Madison and Vine have been disrupted by entrants from the technology sector. Now Google, Netflix (NFLX), Apple (AAPL), and others have a stake in how video GRP will be calculated. Because of YouTube, Google has a particularly substantial interest in this debate.

    Google's founders love data and despise the unmeasurable. Paid search came about largely because Larry Page and Sergey Brin simply would not allow banner advertising on Google.com. Compare that sensibility with the imprecision of traditional media measurement and conflicts arise. Google, Facebook, and the Internet industry overall continuously challenge the efficacy of traditional television by insisting that individual streams and video views be watched to be counted.

    Historically, Nielsen's most important customers have been television networks and their advertisers. For Nielsen to stay relevant, it needs a common GRP standard to maintain its dominance in measuring video across the globe. Reaching consensus among stakeholders with trillions of dollars in market value has taken years of product development and diplomacy by the ratings firm.

    Countless critics of Nielsen long have believed the company was so dependent on network television fees that their measurements could not be trusted. In Ken Auletta's guest appearance February in my class at NYU, "The History of Internet Media," he expressed significant concerns about Nielsen's legitimacy, citing the company's highly controversial DVR ratings as another example of the company's coziness with the television industry.

    Two months later, I asked Hasker about Auletta's observation, and he responded as if he were giving a stump speech. However many people may not want to believe in Nielsen, he argued, advertisers trust his company more than they do any individual media company's numbers.

    In the end, he maintains that the advertising marketplace needs a "referee" or measurement service. Investors rely on Moody's or Standard& Poor's to rate debt. The EPA measures the fuel efficiency of automobiles. Hasker claims that Nielsen has no vested interest whether an ad runs on NBC or Twitter -- cable or mobile. The company wants to measure whether programming and advertising are watched and by whom.

    The implications for the television industry are massive. Nielsen has reinvented the GRP, a standard that has been the source of much of the television market's hegemony in media. If television continues to aggregate huge audiences with highly immersive advertising units, then it will remain difficult to unlock the enormous flow of dollars that support NCIS, The Voice, and dozens of other shows on the evening television schedule.

    But in partnering with an array of digital data providers, Nielsen looks, feels, and acts more and more like an Internet company that measures with substantially increased precision. The company is preparing to measure the behavior of billions of people across millions of devices within a continuously evolving distribution environment with one common GRP standard.

    In this exponentially fractured media landscape, television audiences will likely get smaller. (They have been for decades.) Marketers will struggle to justify their upfront advertising purchases because content will be consumed at time-shifted moments using a panoply of devices and distribution services.

    Tech investor Marc Andreessen once wrote, "Software is eating the world." Software will now eat television advertising as the video content industry reaches a programmatic tipping point. Consumers watch on digital devices across millions of channels. Nielsen will measure every stream, and advertisers will finally receive exactly what they order. Advertising will be bought using algorithms, data, and exchanges.

    The amazing Mel Karmazin's Houdini-like tricks are as doomed as the classified ads you once perused or the CDs collecting dust on your shelf.

    Aaron Cohen is chief marketing officer of Yashi, a New Jersey-based adtech company. He is also an adjunct professor at NYU, teaching the history of Internet media.