Nielsen sets new digital standard for China

Nielsen has launched Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) in China as its first step of expanding the service across Asia.Collaborating with China’s internet giant Tencent, DAR combines more than 800 million Tencent’s active user accounts and data from Nielsen’s nationally representative establishment survey of 46,000 Chinese consumers to provide the unique audience, reach, frequency and gross rating points (GRPs) for a campaign’s full digital audience across computers, tablets and smartphones in a way comparable to TV.DAR will be measured according to three main metrics, which are gender, age and location, and the metrics will further extend to income, education and family size to get deeper insight of consumer behaviours.Advertisers can get real-time results and detailed reports within 24 hours to help optimise their digital campaigns and better reach their target audience to drive online performance.Nielsen’s president of Greater China Xuan Yan said the launch of DAR will result in a huge advantage for advertisers, media agencies and publishers.“Given the explosive growth of online and mobile usage and Chinese consumers’ changing media habits, we believe the introduction of a robust, independent measurement standard for digital campaigns is essential to unlocking additional digital ad growth in China.”Before the official launch of DAR, the research agency has carried out a pilot on around 10 brands across multiples of categories and industries, consisting of ten campaigns (mainly video campaigns) that targets eight separate target groups.The pilot has shedded some light on consumer behavioural trend that advertisters’ choice of content is still critical in digital marketing as consumers from different cities in China with vastly different in lifestyle and habits are largely watching the same content online.The result also showed that video campaigns are more attractive to younger female audiences (18-30), indicating that it is very challenging for brands that are targeting older or male only to hit the target through video campaigns.In addition to Tencent, Nielsen is looking to work with other companies in China to further the creation of an independent standard for digital advertising measurement.“With Tencent, Nielsen’s constant enhancement of the Digital Ad Ratings tool and the participation of more industry players in the future, we hope to create an industry standard for measuring digital campaign audiences,” said Yan.Digital Ad Ratings was first introduced in the U.S. in 2011 partnering with Facebook. It is currently available in eight markets, which are Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, U.K. and the U.S.In addition to China, Nielsen will be launching the service in six more markets this year, including Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, Thailand and Indonesia.