Competition? What competition?

Unlike the survey research industry, where a significant number are clearly worried about the threat posed by Google’s new Consumer Surveys tool, Calhoun dismissed Google’s recently launched Brand Activate initiative as nothing more than “captive measurement”.

For the uninitiated, Brand Activate is Google’s effort to improve the measurement of ads that run on its display network. The company says it wants to tell advertisers not only whether an ad has been served or clicked on, as it currently does, but whether it was actually viewed.

There’s two prongs to the initiative (or three, if you count Consumer Surveys, which is also part of Google’s ambition to “fuel the insights engine”, as industry director Brian Zeug puts it). The first is ‘Active View’, which measures the percentage of an ad seen by a web user and for how long. And then there is Active GRP, which is meant to provide a measure of audience reach that is comparable to TV.

Analysts today wondered whether Google’s online GRP ambitions put it on a collision course with Nielsen, which is delivering its own online GRP metric through the Online Campaign Ratings service. Calhoun, though, doesn’t see it as a direct threat.

“This market is loaded with captive measurements,” he said. “Everyone who has a major publishing business, they are going to try and build a metric that supports their business.” Nielsen, being a third party, focuses on building solutions for all publishers and all forms of content, Calhoun said.

As captive metrics develop, Calhoun suggests there might be ways for Nielsen to use them to augment its own metrics. “But I don’t think about it as a direct threat,” he said.

Besides, Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) is gaining traction in the marketplace. Unilever is using it to measure its US advertising, while AOL is using it as the basis of its advertiser audience guarantee. “I didn’t expect that [sort of deal] to happen this year,” Calhoun said, referencing the AOL agreement. Clearly, it’s a positive step towards aligning the industry around OCR and the numbers look promising – 750 campaigns, 50 advertiser and agencies involved, and 60 publishers and ad networks. OCR doesn’t appear to be generating any meaningful revenue yet. “But we’re being deliberately patient with this,” Calhoun said.

Later, he was asked whether the Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE) product, developed by rival ComScore, was becoming more competitive with OCR. “No,” was the response, though Calhoun conceded that VCE had “a viewability [measurement] advantage” for a couple of months (it measures whether internet users had a chance to see the digital ads delivered to their computers).

And Rentrak? It wasn’t mentioned by name, but the TV set-top box data firm is developing a decent customer base among local market broadcasters by boasting a level of data granularity that Nielsen can’t hope to match using its panel-based measurement approach. Calhoun acknowledged that local markets are where “set-top box has taken effect”, though he reckons most of the progress so far has been on the sell-side – that is, media owners rather than advertisers or media buyers.

“We love set-top box data and will incorporate it into our metrics for local data because it will improve stability,” Calhoun said. “But as a standalone, we do not believe it meets the test. We don’t believe that [set-top box data alone] will ever be an accredited form of measurement.”

In sum: “I feel very good about the business,” said Calhoun. Click here for Nielsen’s first quarter results.

• Is David Calhoun right to be feeling so bullish? Tell us in the comments thread below.