James Smythe becomes UKOM general manager

UKOM, the online measurement company, has appointed James Smythe as its general manager following the departure of Peter Bowman in January.

James Smythe
James Smythe

Smythe has a strong research background, having previously been head of sport research at BRMB and head of market research at GCap.

He’s currently co-founder of market research consultancy Culture of Insight.

Smythe’s appointment comes a month after UKOM launched its long-awaited Audience Planning System (nma.co.uk 10 February 2010).

The panel-based metric has been created in partnership with The Nielsen Company to help brands plan online campaigns by delivering the same targeted reach and frequency measures as BARB (TV), Rajar (radio) and NRS (print).

UKOM is backed by industry bodies including the IAB and AOP.

Its first set of data, released last month, showed Google had the most traffic in January, with 60% of its audience ABC1 and 38% being the main household grocery shopper.

BBC.co.uk had the highest proportion of ABC1 audiences (64%), followed by Wikipedia and Amazon (both 62%). Amazon also boasted the highest proportion of main grocery shoppers (50%), followed by Microsoft (47%).

Smythe said, “By giving brand advertisers a robust basis for including online in multimedia plans, I hope they’ll find it easier to build truly cross-media campaigns that keep up with their customers.”

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk