Sep 1, 2016

Will Your Brogrammer Start a Skunkworks that Bricks Your Phone? Translation Tool: CIMM’s Lexicon 3.0 Update.



Four years and over 1000 terms later, CIMM has released an update to its media measurement industry Lexicon, called Lexicon 3.0.

The CIMM Lexicon, first introduced in 2010, collected all terms and definitions for return path data  media measurement. Two years later in 2012, it expanded to include terms for cross platform, dynamic advertising, connected TV, iTV and Automatic Content Recognition. But the media world has evolved so dramatically and so rapidly with new technology, IoT, digitaization, virtual and augemented reality and programmatic, that the expansion of the media vocabulary required a further update in 2016. What first appeared as a clear cut simple update soon became almost a Sisyphean task as the number and types of terms exponentially increased and new terms coined and introduced daily.

“The challenge of updating the Lexicon has grown vastly more difficult since 2010,” says Jane Clarke, Managing Director and CEO of CIMM.  “Even as this Lexicon was being updated, new terms and definitions were emerging almost daily.  But with this rapid change, the need for having a common language that we can all align on and understand is even more essential to the continued evolution of cross-platform media measurement.”

The rapid expansion of data sources, types of selling and delivery systems and expanding consumer options results in new descriptors and makes the need for an ongoing update of the CIMM Lexicon necessary. As before in previous versions, the updated CIMM Lexicon 3.0 remains true to its original purpose of creating a common language, even as that language expands.  “This is not a final document but a work in progress that will be continually updated,” states Clarke.

Terms like Brogrammer (a portmanteau of bro and programmer, is a satirical, slang term for a male programmer in a fraternity-like milieu), Blockchain (a critical part of the bitcoin peer-to-peer payment system) and Romance Scam (a form of internet scam where thieves use online services to pretend to be romantic companions) have even become part of the language of the culture at large.

Other terms such as Daisy Chain (a programmatic term for the linking of ad networks in order to ensure that an ad will be served in order to optimize revenues), Digibabble (erroneously treating anything digital as a magical marketing tool) and Script Kiddie (an unskilled individual who uses scripts or programs developed by others to attack systems or deface sites) are fairly media-centric.

"It's ironic that digital technology should have streamlined media measurement and have created a common language for cross-platform analytics - but what it has done instead is to create a whole new, inconsistent and ever-changing vocabulary and a measurement Tower of Babel," says Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group. "Until we one day reach that communication and measurement nirvana, the CIMM Lexicon serves as an interim Rosetta Stone to help sort it all out."

Interested in expanding your media vocabulary? A full of copy of CIMM’s Lexicon 3.0 can be downloaded at http://cimm-us.org/cimm-whitepaper/.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

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