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29 March 2024

Nielsen to measure audience in video streaming

Nielsen is shifting to a much stronger and a much valuable strategy worldwide. (AFP)

Published
By Dima Hamadeh

Nielsen is set to roll out an audience measurement service for video streaming in the beginning of July in the region using the tag and site census tools, Diego Semprun De Castellane, Managing Director, Emerging Markets, Emea – Nielsen Online, told Emirates Business.

Site census is a browser-based audience measurement tool that provides in-depth tracking and analysis of your website users, site performance and other critical measurement data. The tolls also examine your site performance, usage trends, content and product placement, visitor loyalty, search engine performance and visitor behaviour.

"We are activating the service in the region and currently on trial with a few companies," he said.

De Castellane said: "I cannot disclose the names of our clients at this moment, right now, but we are moving in that direction of providing this service to clients starting July. We have a combination of local and multinational clients who are interested."

He pointed out that Nielsen is driving the concept of audience measurement for video streaming into an evolved stage, which deals with the complexities of online video streaming. "Downloading video is not about one page. We have to understand factors such as the duration of the video, the variety of delivery systems in videos as opposed to the standard html in online textual content, and so on. At the same time, we are collecting demographics. This measurement service is an extension to the audience measurement which is currently utilised by agencies and publishers within the same environment."

The video streaming measurement solution will allow the measurement team to determine the attentiveness levels of the audience, levels of drop out at a certain point in time and the links that reference to other video links.

De Castellane refused to give more details about Nielsen's future plans, but he said: "At this moment the marketers are very interested in social media. There are multiple case studies that demonstrate the extreme importance and the necessity to pay serious attention to what is happening in social media. We know that online advertising will have to grow by multiple fold. I have read some declarations that suggest that the online investment is quite low compared to the size of the people online. It is impossible that the figure is not going to grow many times."

He added: "There are other factors that will drive this growth. Advertisers are realising that display advertising is effective online, so they will start putting more and more money into display advertising. Another key factor is video online streaming." Nielsen was one of the leaders in introducing discussions regarding audience measurements including both online measurement and people metres for TV audience measurement.

The people metres project has been adopted by the UAE Government and is currently in its structuring phases under the mandate of the National Media Council (NMC) and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA). Stakeholders had recently signed a memorandum of understanding to be part of the project with both NMC and TRA. Following suit, measurement agencies have been launched in the past year to offer different services related to measurement and analysis of online traffic, demographics and behaviour, creating a wider environment with multiple competitors.

De Castellane said: "Nielsen has always had competitors in the audience measurement business. We probably don't think about the competition as much as we look into the industry's needs and requirements for growth. We have been very focused in this region and in other regions for along time on audience measurement.

"Nielsen is shifting to a much stronger and a much valuable strategy all over the world including this region. This strategy involves analysing consumers' purchasing behaviour and what they view online and place them in relation to eachother. This strategy will allow us to provide both to advertisers and media a much valuable insight about the consumers, so that they can devise better engagement with their audience. We are brining this proposition not only to online but to multiple areas."

He added: "This strategy has been there for a long while now, but we are telling this out loud. So the proposition, products, services, solutions and research that we deliver are all focused into servicing those two key needs for advertising and media, by offering insights into both sides of the behaviour of people, viewership and consumption."

De Castellano applauded the huge evolution that has taken place in the advertising industry towards online. "This evolution in my view has happened in a couple of key directions.

"One is that the acceptance of measurement has been generalised across the region and especially in the GCC and Jordan and is expanding to the Mena region very quickly, which is excellent news because it is the forerunner for change."

He added: "The second is the common agreement on the initial steps of which methodologies should be used so everybody agrees that tag is the way to go. There are people already asking for additional steps. But this method provides a common language for everybody.

"Another element that has dramatically changed, and probably going to have bigger impact over time, is the position of the advertisers regarding their understanding of the value of online measurement. They are even becoming more demanding. The combination of those factors is actually very good for the industry and will be creating massive growth in the future. This is building the foundations of a solid industry in the future."

Meanwhile, De Casatellane said the region was two steps behind on the scale of advanced panel-based research that Nielsen offers.

Currently, surveys conducted by Nielsen in the region rely on self-selected online random samples. Yet, Nielsen employs other methods in other global markets, mainly the online panels, a method that is not available in the Mena region. According to De Castellane, online panels are very complicated and require huge investment.

He said: "So far in the region, everybody including Nielsen has been using what we call the tag and random surveys on the idea that these randomised surveys are actually capable of presenting a fair assumption of what a market looks like, based on sufficient responses from that market. I wouldn't say that we do not intend to have panel for audience measurement in the region, we will probably have a panel in the near future. It is on our agenda".

He also said that in a few more advanced markets there are even further methods that marry the system that have existed in the Middle East in the past one and a half years and online panels into what is called a hybrid solution. "That's really where the most advanced markets are moving utilising the extremely accurate outcomes of our tag system to measure the quantitative components, along with a qualitative analysis."

De Castellane said: "There are a lot of complications related to introducing online panels into the region at the time being. One is the need to measure the region's online Arabic audience versus the need to maintain a locally adapted country-by-country panel.