Nielsen Online Service for Audience Measurement launched in South Africa

This morning HelloComputer attended a discussion by Andrew Felbert, who is a Business Development Manager for Nielsen. Andrew showcased Nielsen’s online services for Audience Measurement and Advertising Expenditure Tracking, which has just been introduced locally. Furthermore they discussed Online Brand Advertising – in particular what Advertisers seek from Publishers.

Digital marketers know, and can often be heard bragging, that online is the fastest growing media sector in the local market. So observing the South Africa media spend trends and deploying robust online strategies that make the most of these insights is critical to your brands future success. Here is a taste of what we learnt. And thanks to Andrew for sharing his presentation with me!

Briefly some background about The Nielsen Company; it is the world’s leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and business media products and services. They have offices in over 100 countries worldwide, and in these territories they have developed local products and services that monitor and cover 95% of global Internet spend.

Most media related questions can be answered through their service offerings such as:

International Audience Measurement - IAMS

·         AMPS and RAMS

·         Television audience measurement( TAMS)

·         Advertising Information Services - AIS

·         Advertising Expenditure –Adex

And now a locally deployed list of products and services.

Some interesting stats that were revealed:

·         The gross advertising expenditure for March 2009 excluding self-promotion was R2 Billion

·         This ad spend is 1.2% less than that of March 2008

·         Television, Print and Outdoor are the only media types that had a negative month-on-month growth.

·         In 2008, Global ad spend decreased significantly in the third quarter but there was an increase

·         of 1.5% year-on-year.

·         South African ad spend increase by 5% in 2008.

With regard to the recent elections:

·         Political parties’ January – March 2009 ad spend declined by 6% compared to the same period in 2004.

·         In March 2004, 60% of the political parties’ ad spend was spent on radio. The remaining spend was shared between Print and Outdoor.

·         March 2009 ad spend was distributed almost equally between tv, outdoor and radio. Print got the least share (3%) of this ad spend.

The total spend by Political parties looks like this:

 

Looking at ‘month on month’ percentage growth, we can see the negative growth in media spend quite clearly in the following graph:

January 08 compared to 09 shows a -0.2% growth

February 08 compared to 09 shows a -4% growth

While March shows nominal growth at 1.2% growth

Naturally the recessionary climate is making for cautious spend amongst many advertisers. Many attribute the growth in online to its measurability and ROI, which saw an 8% growth. Other media seeing positive growth are:  cinema 34%, direct mail 26% and radio 16%.

Looking at top 10 advertisers (not in order of spend) in the country during March:

·         KFC

·         Government National

·         Brandhouse

·         Distell

·         MTN

·         Telkom

·         Pick n Pay

·         Shoprite

·         Vodacom

·         Unilever

The Nielsen Company has a number of assets for tracking and measurability. While not all of these are currently available in South Africa, the global products make use of the following tools to aggregate their data:

Meter – tracking the desktop

Tagging – census based counting

Probing – passive measurement of advertising

Text mining – tracking and analysis of User Generated Content (UGC)

Surveys – diagnostic research

These are combined in various ways to depending on your data requirements for example ad effectiveness vs. reporting.

The presentation then moved to the state of brand advertising online. In particular who or what constitutes a good advertising partner, and what they seek from their online publishers. Naturally publishers are looking for long term, high investment, advertisers. And therefore need to know what to offer. There are great examples in the United States of publishers harnessing their true potential.

In their exploration of what Advertisers and Publishers want, they looked at who the good advertising partners are and tried to determine what they look for in publisher partners. The purpose is to help agencies understand what their strategic clients are increasingly looking for in site selection. Consideration was given to Ad formats and various Measurement Metrics.

Publishers are seeking big spending brand advertisers who can become consistent partners.

Plotting advertisers onto a map, with a vertical axis representing large to small volume, and a horizontal axis representing a high to low concentration of placement across websites (high = support for a single presence.) So a large volume / high concentration advertiser would be called a ‘longterm partner’, a large volume / low concentration advertiser would be ‘network heavy’, a small volume/low concentration advertiser would be an ‘online dabbler and a small volume / high concentration advertiser would be a ‘niche partner.’

Here they are:

Network Heavy:  Primarily buy ad networks and portals.  Although they do occasionally partner with individual sites 

Niche Partner:  Tend to buy smaller, local sites. Local TV stations, newspapers. Sometimes heavily niche

Online Dabbler: Mostly occasional big advertising brands testing a niche, or part of a cross-media deal

Long-Term Partner: Tend to buy more on prestige media brands. Brands that have more cache associated with them. Sites that consumers recommend to their friends

So what do publishers need to do to attract good advertisers?

1.       Creativity! The highest rate of impressions documented is in the non-standard formats. Although Button do rate highly too.

2.       Long-Term Partners Work With Mid-Size Sites To Reach A Smaller Aggregate Audience

3.       Long-Term Partners Work With Sites With Higher Levels of Consumer Satisfaction

4.       Long-Term Partners Stress Time Per Page, Not Pages Per Person! (That’s an interesting one!)

An example of someone getting it right. ESPN.com

Stats:

Time Per Page:                  45 sec.

Time Spend Viewing:     43.5 sec.

Audience:                           19.5M

Non-Standard Ads:         29%

www.espn.com

So, in conclusion we learnt (thanks to the Ad Relevance and Market Intelligence products) the following:

·         Having too many ads on your page WONT pay off in the long term

·         Advertisers look for sites with good consumer reputations NOT just ones with random page views driven by search

·         Sites that encourage time and interaction rather than forcing readers onto multiple pages will do better at attracting ad revenue

·         Size does matter, unfortunately, publishers need to provide a moderate level of reach

Ends.