The research firm says real-time advertising analytics would pave the way for advertisers to be able to adjust campaigns on the fly to make sure they are hitting their targets, rather than waiting until after to find out if they scored a hit or not.

ComScore says an immediate feedback loop could help “eliminate advertising waste that occurs in-flight and significantly improve campaign performance”.

Current post-buy methods of campaign evaluation “leave value on the table”, the company says.

It adds: “Eventually, advertising analytics have the potential to get even smarter and deliver predictive value so that campaigns can be better optimised on the front-end, which can eliminate the inevitable waste that occurs at the beginning of the campaign before the media plan has been fully optimised through the initial feedback loop.”

The comments chime with that of Martin Doettling, the CMO of web analytics firm Webtrends, who said in a September interview that real-time analytics will be the focus of significant attention and investment in the next several years.

“The future will be in areas where, instead of aggregating data and looking at data to draw conclusions, marketers will be in a position to react to real-time events,” Doettling said. “Being able to understand in real-time what is happening in your business and being able to impact that with very focused marketing investments and initiatives to influence and effect consumer behaviour… that can only happen with the arrival of big data, and this is where we will see investments in the next two to three years.”

• Click here to download Brave New World, ComScore’s Manifesto for the Future of Digital Media Measurement and Analytics, and read the full interview with Webtrends’ Doettling here.