She runs in Nike shoes, wears Covergirl mascara and her kids eat Cheerios.

Sandberg delivered a personal glimpse into her own association with brands and communities as she delivered a keynote address to Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference today.

Sandberg told the audience of media and consumer packaged goods leaders, that social networks had changed the way businesses related to consumers.

By using the web of human relationships formed on Facebook, Sandberg said marketers could build brands, acquire new customers and deepen relationships with consumers. Perhaps most importantly, Facebook enabled marketers to bring customers into the process and receive real-time feedback on products, leading to new insights that otherwise would be delayed or missed altogether, she said.

In a presentation peppered with glimpses into her own experiences on Facebook, Sandberg said the social networking site of 400 million global users, delivered an opportunity to connect in ways that enabled people to live lives in very different ways than generations pre-Facebook.

For many users, she said, Facebook has become the primary means of communicating, even replacing e-mail. “If you want to know what you’ll be doing tomorrow, look at what teens are doing today,” said Sandberg, noting that only 11% of teens used e-mail, preferring texts/SMS and social networks.

Keeping it Real
What drove Facebook’s effectiveness was its authenticity, said Sandberg. People joined the network with their real identities and entrust the site with their personal information. The fact that Facebook users “like” products or services has real credibility with their friends. A recent study found that people who saw ads for products recommended by their friends had 68% greater product recognition, 200% better memory of brand messaging and were 400% more likely to buy that product, according to Sandberg.

In addition to its authenticity, Sandberg said Facebook stood apart from other social networks because its content is completely member-driven. In fact, Sandberg noted that the foreign language versions of the site were created by more than 300,000 volunteers who used a translation dashboard provided by the company.

She said more than two-thirds (70%) of Facebook’s members lived outside the U.S. and more than 100 million users access the site via mobile devices.

According to The Nielsen Company, nearly 90% of the national advertisements aired during the telecast achieved higher brand recall in the finale, compared to their average in other primetime programming on broadcast and major cable networks in the prior week.

The ads, which spanned the Automotive, Retail, Telecom, CPG, and other categories, on average generated 51% higher Brand Recall, 92% higher Message Recall, and 66% higher Likeability when airing in the LOST finale versus their other airings in the prior week.

Even during its regular season, LOST has typically provided a strong vehicle for advertisers. Nielsen found that commercials airing in the three May episodes leading up to the finale were on average 27% better-recalled during LOST than they were in other primetime programs. Still, with a 51% lift in Brand Recall, the finale episode delivered an even higher level of commercial attention.

Verizon, which had run a series of “hybrid” tie-in ads during the preceding retrospective episode, posted one of the strongest gains of any advertiser. Its traditional ads on average generated 100% higher Brand Recall during the LOST finale.

Viewers, which skewed slightly more female (54%) than male (46%), were particularly fond of a spot from Target, which incorporated themes from the show into a customized creative. Target’s “smoke monster” ad promoting First Alert detectors, captured the strongest Net Likeability of any ad in the show – nearly quadrupling the average of all other spots in the telecast.

A sampling of finales from other highly engaging TV series – across reality, drama and comedy – found that advertisers generally received 10-30% greater Brand Recall compared to their airings in other programming.

How do you really measure the total advertising effectiveness of a Super Bowl ad? This is a complicated question because TV advertising increasingly triggers a host of direct or indirect online activity, from visiting a website to talking about the ad on Twitter or Facebook. Recently at Nielsen we began testing a new metric, the Blended Media Score (BMS), with the goal of giving brands and content providers a more complete view of ad effectiveness. This BMS metric tracks the impact from traditional “Paid Media” (TV ads, banner ads) but also “blends” data from online buzz and social media – what we’re calling “Earned Media.” There’s no better environment to road test this Blended Media Score than the Super Bowl, where the online conversations can impact brand perception in new and meaningful ways both before and after a traditional ad hits the airwaves.

Biggest Bowl and Biggest Buzz
Roughly 106.5 million tuned into CBS’ telecast of Super Bowl XLIV, making it the most watched TV program ever in the United States. In addition, the game generated the highest volume of online conversation and “Earned Media,” with conversation spikes on Facebook and Twitter playing a disproportionate role in the growth of overall conversation.

The top Blended Media Score performers for the 2010 Super Bowl managed to perform well in both earned media (buzz volume, sentiment, increased engagement through social media channels) and paid media (recall, likeability, audience/reach).

Brands that succeeded in only one area fell in the middle of the pack for their BMS ranking. For example, Focus on the Family over-indexed on earned media due to their very high volume of conversation (122) but under-indexed in paid media (80), causing them to fall 16th out of 43 advertisers.

Brands that offered free products or trial incentives (Denny’s, Dockers) over-performed in earned media relative to other advertisers. The offers not only spurred higher levels of buzz, but also appeared to provide unique “pass along” currency to consumers. Specifically, Denny’s succeeded largely due to the earned media its advertising gained because of the “free factor.” Offering free breakfast won over consumers and led to very high likability scores as well as a large amount of online discussion. Their frequent updates and teasers on Facebook led to many individuals becoming fans of the brand online.

E*Trade leveraged a integrated social media campaign to gain attention of their Facebook page and YouTube channel. They integrated their Facebook page across their full advertising strategy; as a result, they experienced a large influx of Facebook fans and experienced the second largest increase in fans among all advertisers.

Post-Game Plan
So where is this going? The first half of 2010 will see the single largest concentration of high-spend “advertising” events in recent memory in the form of the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, and World Cup. Our Super Bowl analysis is the first phase of a three-part “Trifecta” that will take a deep and holistic cross-platform look at advertising effectiveness. All three of these events will involve unprecedented levels of integrated marketing, and we’ll continue applying BMS to these events.

Additional support and analysis: Kim Cox, Alka Gupta and Nina Stratt

Best-Liked Ads Often Split Along Gender Lines

Nearly a third of females reported to dislike the two GoDaddy spots, placing them among the game’s least popular commercials. Both Coca-Cola spots – “The Simpsons” and “Man Sleepwalks” – fell just out of the Top 10 most-liked ads for the overall Super Bowl audience, but ranked among the most popular ads among males. Even different ad executions from the same brand showed varied responses by gender. For example, Doritos aired four Super Bowl ads – two of which were equally liked among both men and women (“Man attacks guys at gym” and “Boy slaps date”), while another resonated particularly well with females (“Dog puts collar on man”) by 22 points and the other was better-received by men (“Casket full of snack chips”) by 13 points. Similarly, the E*Trade spot – “Baby talks with his girlfriend” – was 14 points better-liked among females, while the other E*Trade commercial – “Babies cry about broker” – was found to be equally appealing by both genders. The Focus on the Family spot featuring college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, ranked as one of the game’s most polarizing. It resulted in a high percentage of viewers (driven primarily by females) who reported to “like it,” but it also generated a high proportion of audience who claimed to “dislike it.” And ad for the U.S. Census Bureau struggled to gain appeal from either sex (ranking in the Bottom 3 among both genders), however, older viewers reported a higher memorability of the ad than younger viewers.

The vast majority of Super Bowl ads were better-recalled among older viewers 35+ compared to younger viewers 13-34 (following a generally observed pattern regarding advertising attention), but four spots had at least 10 points higher Brand Recall among the younger set – including Motorola’s “Megan Fox sends picture” spot, Audi’s “Green Police” ad, Boost “Football Shuffle” ad, and the Monster “Beaver plays Violin” spot.

“Helping marketers measure the effectiveness of advertising using Facebook has been a priority for us and working with Nielsen helps us continue doing just that. Marketers have responded positively to BrandLift studies in the U.S. and we know marketers in the U.K. will also benefit from a better understanding of how people react to their online campaigns,” said Stephen Haines, Facebook’s U.K. Commercial Director.

“The power and scale of Facebook’s community provides a unique platform for research and this offering complements the portfolio of tools available to marketers in the U.K. with simple and fast insights on brand advertising. Facebook and Nielsen are committed to changing how people think about online advertising, particularly looking beyond direct response to the effectiveness of the Internet for brand-oriented campaigns. To do this we intend to quickly build up a body of work in the UK to provide local benchmarks to supplement those already available from studies done in the U.S.,” said Louise Ainsworth, EMEA Managing Director, of Nielsen’s online division.

So far, more than 70 studies have been conducted in the U.S. across the Fast Moving Consumer Goods, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Technology, Telecom, Financial and Automotive sectors. These studies revealed swift changes in brand ‘lift’ metrics such as awareness, especially for products and brands that are new or less well known. Not every advertising campaign resulted in a change in consumer attitudes; however 97 percent of studies saw statistically significant lift on at least one key brand lift metric while 85 percent of studies saw increases across at least two key metrics.

Nielsen data shows that Facebook had a 10.2 percent share of display-ad views in the U.K. in 2009, up from 6.4 percent in 2008. At the start of 2010, almost 60 percent of Britons active online visited the site, which accounted for just over 17 percent of all UK time on the Internet.

Download the Facebook and Nielsen U.K. press release.

Recently, a client and I were discussing online advertising metrics, with topics ranging from engagement to awareness to intent, and of course, Return on Investment. It wasn’t until after the meeting when it struck me that not once did click through rates enter into the conversation. My hope is that this, and other similar conversations, is a signal that the online ad world is moving beyond its longtime fascination with the click through — the low-hanging (and sometimes over-ripe) fruit of online ad metrics.

Toward the goal of helping the industry move beyond the click through myopia that had historically characterized online ad measurement, I pulled together some analysis that is pretty interesting.

At Nielsen, we’ve done extensive work, particularly in the consumer packaged goods and retail industries, to help advertisers quantify the effect that online display advertising has on offline purchases. The results are quite positive. Looking at more than 300 campaigns over a span of about 5 years, using the basic formula below, we find the average ROI is a positive 157 percent.

What’s the bottom line for those watching their bottom line? Display advertising — particularly targeted advertising — works.

OK, But What About Those Clicks?
In an effort to measure the relationship between click through rates and ROI, we ran an analysis across 200 of those campaigns. The table below summarizes our findings. On the Y-axis we’ve plotted ROI percent percent and on the X- axis we’ve plotted click through rate.

If there were a relationship between the two metrics, we’d expect to see a grouping of red dots with an up/rightward inclination (the more clicks, the better the ROI). Instead, what we see is something more like a blob or a swarm. For you quantitative thinkers, the correlation between the two metrics is a negative .07, meaning that there is no relationship whatsoever between the two metrics. More to the point: across the campaigns measured, click through rate was in no way predictive of a campaigns’ overall effectiveness.

Beyond the obvious finding that advertisers should not be overly focused on click through rates, the big idea here is that advertisers should be including online display advertising in their overall marketing mix, increasingly taking advantage of flash/video ad units to reach the consumer, without the hope that the person exposed to the ad will be one of the few that actually click on ads.

Does this mean that display advertising works as well as it could? No, it does not. The online advertising medium is still immature. Great Don Draper-like story- tellers have not yet had their Kodak Carousel moments. While metrics don’t make great creative, in the long run, a focus on the right metrics will ensure that the creative that we consider great creative actually makes money for advertisers.

“Click through” to the comments to add your thoughts.

Jon Gibs, Vice President, Media Analytics, The Nielsen Company

SUMMARY: Why do advertisers still debate the value of online advertising? Because no precise measure of online audience delivery exists. The missing factor? Who—as in who is viewing your ads, not just how many ads were served. Does online advertising deliver the target audience? With current evaluation methods, it’s difficult to tell. What’s needed is a shift in metrics for audience targeting from impressions to dwell time, increasing the cost per thousand in the process.

Because of their simplicity, we in media research tend to overlook the core principles of successful advertising. These principles can be reduced to three basic questions:

• How many?
• Who?
• Did it work?

“How many?” is the volume of ads, using measures like impressions, gross rating points and the like. “Who?” is the targeted audience, whatever parameters are selected to define the desired population like age, income, education and household size. “Did it work?” is the effectiveness of the campaign. Did it change the thinking or behavior of viewers? Did it increase brand awareness? Did it drive purchase? The online advertising industry is very good at measuring “how many?” in the form of ad serving reports. We have also developed multiple models around “did it work?”, from branding studies to offline sales impact. We, however, have spent little time on the second question, “who?” The irony is that this question—the demographics of those people exposed to the ad campaign—is at the core of ad delivery reporting in almost all other media.

The missing link
Measures of demographic delivery are critical for every other form of media buying. The Internet, however, skipped over this link in the media value chain. Online publishers have spent a decade trying to answer the question “Does online advertising work?” The problem is, that’s the wrong question. This question has driven advertisers to focus on direct response metrics, such as click through, or short term brand lift, without any consideration of the long-term branding impacts on the advertisers’ targets.

The right question is “who does the advertising reach?” This is the question asked of almost all other media, where there is an understanding that a great deal of the impact of the advertising is related to the creative, rather than the media placement. To get to the answer of “who”, the industry needs to develop a standardized, robust, post-buy reporting structure to help keep the targeters on target, and prove from end-to-end, the value of Internet advertising.

Targeting for today
Targeting in the Internet world refers to any form of online advertising that is not run-of-site, run- of-network or content section-specific. I would argue that even contextual, content section specific ads are targeted. One of the great advantages of online advertising is that, unlike traditional media, targeting happens on the execution side, not just in planning. For online or mobile media, the first step in a campaign mirrors traditional media. Marketers determine a schedule of web sites, portals or ad networks that will deliver the desired audience.

The big difference: online media buyers can also buy actual audience segments based on elements like geo-coded inventory through a reverse IP look-up, modeled segmentation based on cookie or panel data, offline sales data, registered user data and a host of other possibilities. As this form of targeting grows in popularity, conventional census-based delivery reports become less useful as many only show raw server counts of impressions—rather than highlighting the ability of publishers to deliver on their promised targets.

Says who?
Another issue with actual online results is that they tend toward unreliable self-reporting. While reports cover impressions, they tend to skirt the issue of targeting accuracy. Some chalk it up to the fact that audience delivery metrics aren’t sexy, while a more cynical group asserts that it has more to do with not wanting agencies or publishers to look bad if results fall short.

Yet another opinion points to the fact that measurement firms have only recently started to produce post-buy reports. Since each research company uses a slightly different methodology, it is impossible to compare results across campaigns and vendors. Also, in many cases, these reports can’t be generated for some forms of behavioral targeting without the client revealing proprietary information.

Prime examples
Examples of online measurement at work for a mobile phone manufacturer include one case using household income as a segmentation criterion, the other using age as a criterion. In the first scenario, the company wanted to market a low-cost smart phone to middle income households in the $50,000–$75,000 per-year range.

According to a Nielsen analysis, the campaign failed badly. Only about 25% of advertising reached the targeted households. Even more disheartening, the supposedly targeted campaign impacted 9% fewer target audience members than a more general run-of-network buy. Three out of four ad dollars were wasted on other segments.

Killer app
In a second example, the mobile phone manufacturer was rolling out its new killer app—an iPhone substitute designed for young adults ages 18–24 primarily, and 25–34 secondarily. Results were better in this case, albeit mixed.

The good news: the campaign over-indexed significantly among the two targeted age groups, 56% more for the primary audience and 25% more for the secondary audience than a random campaign would deliver. The bad news: 62% of impressions accrued to consumers age 35+, outside of the preferred demographic. Although disappointing, it makes sense given the age distribution of the U.S. and online populations which skew older.

Timing is everything
Although ad impression counts traditionally have been the currency of the Internet, there is reason to believe that this accounting method itself had led to the decline of online advertising CPMs. Since publishers are paid on the number of ads served, many have created cluttered environments that increase inventory levels beyond demand—therefore driving down CPMs.

This decline in CPMs is made up by serving more ads and therefore, continuing to decrease the value of any individual ad unit. This cycle creates a financial situation where publishers are disincentivized in the short-term to provide a good advertising environment because they need to create more clutter. This clutter does not simply decreases CPMs, but also advertising effectiveness and therefore, the value of the media overall to advertisers.

In essence, because the Internet is the first medium with truly unlimited inventory potential (i.e., one can cut pages into tiny bits and there is no significant cost of delivery), an impression-based ad model has driven publishers to look for short-term gains at the expense of the long-term health of the industry.

So, what is the answer? When it comes to online advertising, time is the x-factor. Most research suggests that the longer a person is exposed to an ad, the more effective it will be—up to the point of diminishing returns. Perhaps the future of post-buy reporting—and online advertising—has more to do with time than impressions or page views.

The reason for this is that time is the only equalizing measure between the three core groups of online content—video, social media and standard content. Rather than simply counting the number of impressions served, the appropriate measure becomes the “dwell time” (time spent) on a page or with an impression. Using this method, we are also able to reduce inventory (and perhaps drive up CPMs) by saying that impressions that only have a “dwell time” above certain levels are actually counted as true impressions.

Time vs. frequency
A time-based post-buy measure rewards sites that surround advertising with a robust contextual environment, encouraging audience “dwelling.” As the graph illustrates, Site 3 provides a big bang for the buck on a per-target basis, generating fewer but much longer impressions, effectively increasing the value of each impression to the advertiser.

Conversely, Site 4 pursues an outdated approach of ramping up the number of impressions with much shorter exposure times, decreasing the value of each impression. As the value of each impression goes up, so should the CPM.

The way forward
If the Internet is to improve CPMs—and perhaps save the overall advertising market from its fate—we must focus on time-based post reporting. The post reporting itself provides brand advertisers with what they really need and understanding if their ads reach the audience they seek. The time element rewards those sites that limit their inventory by adding a financial incentive to create a good environment for advertising and also links inventory measures to a counting method that should produce more effective advertising overall.

Now that’s something to dwell on.