Bits Blog: Tech Rivals Lay Down Arms for Youth Coding

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A Coding Standard to Track Media Assets Is Proposed

For advertisers and media companies, keeping track and organizing the tonnage of media assets — from video clips to commercials — can be a challenge, particularly online. On Thursday, a media industry organization announced the findings of a two-year study that uses a coding system to monitor these assets, similar to how U.P.C. labels track consumer products from shipping to purchase.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, the industry group, advocated for the widespread adoption of the new system at an event in New York, saying it would allow media companies to earn additional billions of dollars in revenue while saving millions of dollars on back-end processing systems currently used to track media.

Companies that tag their ads and their videos with these standardized codes will also be better able to determine where, when and how the content is viewed.

Some of the companies involved in the test phase include NBCUniversal Media, Viacom, Turner Broadcasting, Starcom MediaVest Group, ESPN, Hulu, ABC, Nielsen, Arbitron and comScore.

“Brands, advertisers and networks produce more content than ever but, unfortunately, the industry still lacks the ability to accurately identify and track assets across all distribution points,” said Jane Clarke, the managing director for the coalition in a statement.

Janice Finkel-Greene, the executive vice president of buying analytics at MagnaGlobal, said the coding system would also help advertisers manage the sheer amount of data available to them from sources like social media and research companies like Nielsen.

“We wind up with all of this wonderful data but we have difficulty putting it together,” Ms. Finkel-Greene said.

The coding system would help advertisers more precisely tailor ads to a particular audience, she added. The system would also help companies automate what can be a haphazard often manual process of coding content.

Such a system would allow media companies “to spend less time putting the data together and more time doing analysis,” Ms. Finkel-Greene said.

Charles Kennedy, a senior vice president of research at ABC, said the media industry had been “hampered by the labor intensity and the complexity” of keeping track of digital media. Using a standardized coding system would help the company show the right ads to the right people, especially those who view content online. If a consumer watches an ABC show days after it has aired on television, ABC would be able to show the viewer updated ads — and profit off the ad that is shown.

“It will help us move into the world where we have dynamic ad insertion,” Mr. Kennedy said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the organization proposing a new way to track and monitor media assets. It is the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, not the Coalition for Media Management.

Special Report: The Female Factor: Computer Coding: It's Not Just for Boys

But when she told her best friend — “he’s male, also into programming” — his response was not what she had expected. “He was like, ‘Wait, how do you know about them? You’re a girl and you shouldn’t be doing that,”’ Ms. Aleksander said incredulously.

She and her friend Honey Ross, 15, are among the few girls at King Alfred School, their private school in North London, with an intense interest in technology. The two, confident and outgoing, say they understand why: computing can seem boring from the outside, populated mainly by nerdy boys.

“It’s sad,” Ms. Ross said, chatting between classes in the computer lab. “It’s such an amazing world. It’s kind of waiting for loads of young girls” to jump in.

Belinda Parmar would love to see that happen, particularly since current statistics suggest that women in technology, already a relative rarity, are about to get even scarcer.

Three years ago, Ms. Parmar founded Lady Geek, a consulting firm that helps technology companies connect with female customers and bolster the number of women in work forces. Convinced that the paucity of women in technology has its roots in earlier life, Ms. Parmar last fall started Little Miss Geek, a non-profit aimed at convincing girls that programming is not a solitary grind but creative and eventually lucrative work.

Both sexes love gadgets — but while girls may enjoy owning the latest devices, parents and teachers do not point out that they also have the brains to build them, Ms. Parmar says.

“They’re dreaming of using the iPad mini and the latest smartphone, but they’re not dreaming of creating it,” she said.

As a consequence, Ms. Parmar said, women are missing out in an industry that is changing the world and growing and paying handsomely, as other sectors shrink.

Britain’s technology sector is 20 percent female, according to Eurostat, the E.U. statistics agency; Ms. Parmar cites a figure of 17 percent. Neither is far off the E.U. average of 21.8 percent, or the U.S. rate of 24 percent of technology jobs held by women, down from 36 percent in 1991, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The future looks bleak. Girls take just 8 percent of Britain’s computer science A-levels, the high school exam that is the passport to university studies, Little Miss Geek reports. In the United States, girls are 19 percent of high school Advanced Placement test-takers in the field, the Colorado center says.

Ms. Parmar traces the problem at least partly to technology’s image. When her team asked children to draw a person who worked in technology, all sketched men, often geeky and disheveled.

That brainy-guys-in-the-garage stereotype is hardly helped by companies that Ms. Parmar believes condescend to female customers with pink devices, and offend them with bikini-clad models at technology shows. “The technology industry is 30 years behind the car industry” in interaction with women, she said.

If they do enroll in computer classes, pre-adolescent and teenage girls often find they are the only girls in the room.

“Even girls that are doing well at math, they opt out. They just want to belong,” said Marina Larios, president of the European Association for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology.

Messages about gender and technology tend to start in earliest childhood, when boys are encouraged to play computer games and think about how things work, while girls get toy makeup and fashion sets, Ms. Parmar said.

Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the Colorado center, said:

“It appears on the surface that women aren’t choosing” technology, but “there are a lot of factors that are influencing that choice.” She continued: “Girls talk about how even when there’s a computer in the house, they don’t get access to it as much, because the boys are pushing them away.”

Subtle, even unconscious bias can prompt parents, teachers and guidance counselors to give the sexes different study and career advice, she said.