Over half of China’s Internet users regularly blog and uses social media.

Everyone knows that if you want to reach a lot of people fast, going digital is a good bet. But in China, the odds are even better. Boasting the largest Internet community in the world with over 420 million online users, China’s online community has shown steady double-digit user growth rates over the past five years.

The rapidly increasing growth of online is no surprise. The digital landscape provides a virtual playground of activity as a one-stop shop to satisfy entertainment, information, communication and business needs—all at the touch of our fingertips. In China, users are partial to listening to music, catching up on the latest news, using the Internet as a search tool to research a topic, connecting with friends, family or colleagues through instant messaging and playing enjoying online games and virtual experiences.

The consumer-generated media (CGM) environment is making great strides in China. More than half of all online Chinese users regularly blog and use social media to voice their opinions about entertainment, relationships, sports, politics, technology—you name it. One-third of users partake in online discussion forums and BBS (bulletin board) sites.

Using online services to conduct business transactions is slowly taking shape and presents tremendous opportunity. Only Oone in three Chinese consumers use business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer commerce sites and 30% take advantage of convenient online payment and banking options. Only 15% use the Internet to trade stocks and funds and fewer than 10% book their travel online.

As consumers take advantage of the many and varied benefits that online provides, they are spending an increasingly significant amount of time behind an electronic device—be it a desktop computer, mobile phone, or personal device. The overwhelming majority of online users—about three-fourths—however, use a desktop as the preferred Internet device in China. Time spent online has grown gradually from 2001 until the middle of 2010 reaching an average of almost 20 hours per week.

Online Advertising Trends
Gaining share of mind continues to fragment in the media world and online advertising is taking an important place at the bargaining table. In fact, in the first three quarters of 2010, online advertising value reached almost 15M RMB—a 21% increase over the same time period in 2009. The advertising cycle shows peaks in the spring, summer, fall and during the Christmas season, but dips during the Chinese Spring Festival also known as Chinese New Year—the longest and most important of Chinese festivities, which always falls between January 21 and February 21.

Online ads for fashion, capturing 19.2% market share in the first nine months of 2010, is the top online advertising activity. Automotive ads follow closely behind with a 17.9% share of market. Ads for retail, computer/electrical and fast-moving consumer goods round out the top five online activities with the greatest market share. On the rise are online ads for manufacturer/wholesale products, community sites and energy/raw materials, which show the greatest year-on-year growth.

Keeping a Pulse
As the online landscape continues to mature and evolve, keeping connected with online audiences is not only critical, it is necessary for survival. As a pioneer in audience measurement business, Nielsen together with China Websites Ranking provides the first China online audience measurement to help navigate the world’s largest Internet community.

During June – which accounted for the first three weeks of the tournament and the 10 days preceding it – the FIFA website proved to be most popular in Brazil (visited by 7.0% of Brazilians online, 2.8 million people) and in the U.K. (6.9% of people online, 2.7 million). Despite their tournament ending on the 25th June, Switzerland followed with 5.6% of Swiss people online (0.25 million people) visiting FIFA’s site, probably driven by the team’s shock opening round victory over eventual winners Spain.

The FIFA site offers versions in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Arabic and International Sign, but not Italian or Japanese. Despite this, 4.8% of Italians online (1.2 million people) still visited the site during June, although the lack of the local language did prove too much of an obstacle in Japan where only 0.1% of Japanese people online visited the site.

“The reach that the FIFA site achieved is impressive considering the kaleidoscopic variety of competing soccer, general sports and news sites available to consumers to follow such a large global event,” said Alex Burmaster, VP Global Communications at Nielsen’s online division. “The fact that one in 14 Brazilians online, for example, went to FIFA’s site in such a cluttered online environment illustrates a level of achievement.”

Not only did the FIFA website have the biggest footprint in Brazil but it also witnessed the most engaged audience – Brazilian visitors averaged almost 28 minutes on the site during June. In the U.S., although the site had a relatively low penetration among countries under Nielsen’s measurement (2.8% of Americans online visited the site) the U.S. actually provided the most total visitors to the site (5.4 million people) and, following Brazilians, the U.S. was the most engaged audience at almost 22 minutes per visitor for the month.

“The U.S. outperformed expectations in the World Cup and the FIFA site had a highly engaged core of US consumers who averaged more time on the site than fans in more traditionally soccer-mad nations such as England, Germany, Spain and France,” noted Burmaster. “The FIFA website provided a huge, and welcome, buffet of World Cup information from which U.S. soccer fans could satisfy their appetite over and above the relatively light offering in U.S. mainstream media compared to the near saturated coverage in more established soccer countries.”

In all the markets, except one, the FIFA website – when compared to the overall Internet audience in each country – was overly-weighted towards male visitors and struggled on attracting females.

The site had the most male-dominated audience in Brazil (71% male) and Australia (70%), while in Italy (67%) and Spain (66%) it also had at least-two thirds male visitors.

Germany was the only country in which the site had more female (54%) than male visitors (46%) and it was also the only market in which it over-performed – relative to the entire online audience – on attracting females and under-performed on attracting males.

In all the countries under measurement, the FIFA website was overly-weighted towards 18-49 year olds – particularly the 18-34 segment – while it struggled on attracting visitors under 18 and those over 50.

The greatest contrast between the make-up of FIFA’s audience compared to the overall Internet audience occurred in the U.S. market. In the U.S., the site over-performed most heavily on attracting 18-49 year olds and under-performed most on attracting people under 18 and those over 50.

In most of the countries, the majority of FIFA’s online audience was over 35 years old – particularly in France where almost 60% were over 35. Only in Spain (47%) and Brazil (34%) did the site have fewer visitors over 35 compared to those under 35.

“Across the globe, the FIFA site tends to be a destination for 18-49 year old males. The World Cup represents a unique opportunity for brands to connect with this highly engaged, mid-age-range male-dominated audience as reflected by sponsors who are in the business of producing beer, car tyres and engine oil,” said Burmaster. “Castrol, for example, scored a masterstroke in sponsoring the statistics section of the World Cup website. Consequently, they will have connected with large numbers of this often elusive audience across a wide range of markets at a time when they’re notoriously engaged – checking out soccer stats.”

2010 U.S. Outlook

Part 1: Cross Media

• Big Screen, Smart Screen, Small Screen: Top 5 Cross-Media Trends
• You Can Take It With You: Future Trends In Media

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Part 2: Consumer

• Winner Winner Chicken Dinner – Top 5 Consumer Goods Spending Trends
• Innovation Creates Opportunities for CPG Growth
• Aging Puts a Wrinkle in U.S. Marketplace

---

Part 3: Advertising

• Talking Back – Top Five Advertising Trends
• Get Ready for the Audience-Centric Web
• What Would John Wanamaker Say Today?

---

Part 4: Entertainment

• There’s No Business Like Show Business – Top Five Entertainment Trends
• Game On – The World is Watching More Than Ever
• Video Games in Play

This week, Nielsen announced the creation of a joint venture with the Catalina Marketing Corporation. This venture is a major advancement for marketing ROI as well as a milestone in the evolution of online advertising. The next phase of the Internet— what we call the “audience-centric Web”— will be characterized by three things:

1. The audience is the center of everything. Small wonder that many brand advertisers only dabble with the Web; we’ve given them metrics—clicks, impressions, page views—but those metrics lack context and value and don’t relate to their customers. In the audience-centric Web, metrics will answer traditional marketing questions: Who saw my ad? Did I affect the way they think about my product? Did they actually buy more?
2. Online is no longer an island. Sophisticated marketers will be able to advertise across channels, supported by the transparency and efficiency of consistent media metrics. A brand’s measure of online impact will be the same as on TV or mobile or print. Online publishers will be able to compete—on a level playing field—across media.
3. The richer the consumer data, the richer the business opportunity. Nielsen has helped the largest and most successful marketers and media companies in the world grow their businesses. Their market shares have grown through a richer and deeper understanding of their consumers. Whether it’s reaching men aged 18 to 24, women with incomes of over $150,000, heavy users of Tide or Hispanic teens, the match of consumer need to marketing message starts with the audience. In the audience-centric Web, that richness of insight will now be available to online marketers, just as it has been offline.

Nielsen has been the pursuing this for years: we have invested more than a billion dollars acquiring companies and developing products that help our clients better understand and measure their online audiences. In everything we’ve done, we’ve had an unwavering commitment to data quality and an openness to working with others who bring assets or capabilities we don’t have ourselves.

We’ve been a pioneer in online/offline CPG sales measurement since 2004. We acquired engagement-leader IAG in 2008. We launched a brand effectiveness partnership with Facebook.

Most recently, we announced that Internet meters would be added to our television panel. This is a huge step forward in understanding and measuring Web audiences, as every demographic and geographic group in America is carefully recruited in proportion to the population. Matched with hundreds of thousands of other online panelists, Nielsen will now be able to even more precisely report usage of the Internet, TV and games—and give new insights to advertisers on how these platforms work with one another.

Our joint venture with Catalina will be the most robust effectiveness measurement platform in the industry. It will allow Nielsen clients to match online audiences with a representative base of 50 million shoppers from a cross section of retailers from across the country. Not only will advertisers know where their potential customers like to surf, but also they can measure whether exposure to online advertising turns those consumers into actual buyers.

By anonymously matching Nielsen’s data with Catalina’s, we can be even more granular than ever before in our description of the offline purchase behavior of online audiences.

Now, advertisers will be better able to measure who actually saw their ads, and how effective they’ve been in driving purchases.

And publishers – particularly those who invest in quality content or services – will now be able to deliver confidence to their advertisers that online advertising plays a fundamental role in meeting their overall brand objectives.

More information will be forthcoming throughout 2010 and beyond as this joint venture continues to innovate, and enrich the solutions we offer clients.

Meanwhile, get ready for the audience-centric Web!

2010 U.S. Outlook

Part 1: Cross Media

• Big Screen, Smart Screen, Small Screen: Top 5 Cross-Media Trends
• You Can Take It With You: Future Trends In Media

---

Part 2: Consumer

• Winner Winner Chicken Dinner – Top 5 Consumer Goods Spending Trends
• Innovation Creates Opportunities for CPG Growth
• Aging Puts a Wrinkle in U.S. Marketplace

---

Part 3: Advertising

• Talking Back – Top Five Advertising Trends
• Get Ready for the Audience-Centric Web
• What Would John Wanamaker Say Today?

---

Part 4: Entertainment

• There’s No Business Like Show Business – Top Five Entertainment Trends
• Game On – The World is Watching More Than Ever
• Video Games in Play

On November 12-13, I took part in a Washington D.C., hearing organized by the FDA on how pharmaceutical companies can use the Internet and social media to communicate with consumers. The hearing was a source of excitement in the healthcare industry – the FDA received more than 800 requests for 350 seats.

Over two days, more than 60 speakers – representing pharmaceutical companies, agencies, research firms, search and social media websites along with consumer organizations – shared their thoughts on how companies can responsibly engage consumers online, as well as questions and areas that need clarification from FDA.

Despite the variety of industries and agendas represented, I was surprised by the amount of consistency in the presentations and recommendations. Through the two days of the hearing, a few key themes emerged:

• No one can ignore the explosive power of social media.
  Several speakers shared great data about how often the Internet is used as a source for healthcare information. With patients, caregivers and doctors alike going online for healthcare information, it simply is not an option for pharmaceutical companies to remain separated from this discussion.
• No one company can be expected to monitor the whole of the Internet.
  In our Nielsen BuzzMetrics dataset of health-specific CGM sites, we collected an average of 83,000 messages per day over the past six months. This volume will only continue to grow, and no one can expect to monitor all of it.
• Pharma is ready to listen, but confusion persists.
  Most pharmaceutical companies would like to listen and even respond to consumer feedback online. However, there is confusion among pharmaceutical companies about how and when it is appropriate for them to engage with consumers online, and what responsibilities they have in doing so. This confusion often results in companies holding back on engaging in social media and sometimes even in listening to what their consumers are saying online.
• Adverse events are a red herring.
  Companies that have not done social media listening often have a fear that they will see a high volume of adverse events in online consumer conversation. (And for pharmaceutical companies, there is a requirement that these events are followed up and reported to the FDA.) In fact, the number of adverse events in online discussion is very low and manageable within the reporting systems that pharmaceutical companies already have in place.

This last point was the basis of my testimony at the hearing. In 2008, Nielsen analyzed online healthcare discussion to define the number of adverse events and found that just 4 of 500 messages contain adverse event information, and only 1 of those messages contained all of the criteria that are required for AE reporting.

For me, the key takeaway from the FDA hearing was this: More and more consumers are online looking for information on their health. Some of the information they find online is good, but some is not, and it’s not always easy to tell the difference. Right now anyone can contribute to the online health discussion except the pharmaceutical companies, who are waiting for guidelines from the FDA about how to engage online in an appropriate and responsible way.

There was a sense of hope among attendees at the hearing that the FDA will provide new guidelines on the Internet and social media relatively soon. When that happens, not only do we empower the pharmaceutical companies to interact with consumers online, but we give them a sense of duty to contribute to the conversation in a responsible way. Of course it’s not appropriate for pharmaceutical companies to get involved in every consumer discussion about healthcare online. But where these companies can contribute value to the discussion, let’s empower them to do just that.

Like many of my colleagues in the pharmaceutical/healthcare field, I look forward to watching and participating as the discussion continues to unfold.

• Download a healthcare-focused whitepaper authored by Melissa Davies: Listening to Consumers 101, How Marketers Can Leverage Consumer-Generated Media

SUMMARY: When is a phone not a phone? In the hands of children and tweens, today’s cell phones are primarily used as text messaging devices, cameras, gaming consoles, video viewers, MP3 players, and incidentally, as mobile phones via the speaker capability so their friends can chime in on the call. Parents are getting dialed in to the social media phenomenon and beginning to understand—and limit—how children use new media.

• This article draws from a keynote speech delivered last month at the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) annual conference.

Digital media is an enabling framework for brands, parents and educators—it’s on demand, interactive, sensing and connected. And social media adds expression and sharing capabilities. A vast menu of web and mobile tools has been developed to facilitate information sharing and commentary on the Web. Applications and outlets have kept pace as consumers rush to populate blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, forums, message boards and online communities.

In the marketing world, the buzz is all about consumer-generated media. Companies have discovered thatno paid-for communication campaign has the impact of missives penned by consumers grounded in relevant, first-hand experience. Their influence is immediate, highly viral and authentic, with an extremely long tail attributable to archived material.

Giving voice
What motivates people to go online and on the record with personal opinions and information? In part, it is the very human need to be heard and to connect with others. It is the desire to make a difference, to influence the world around us. It is the drive to evangelize on behalf of the things and the people we love. And it is the ongoing quest for authenticity in a world governed by image.

Mobile devices represent a major impetus behind the social media movement, driving part of the 250% audience increase for the year ending February 2009. Teens represented 19% of the 12.3 million active social networkers.

Childhood connections
To adults, cell phones are a communications device. To children, they are a lifeline. Consider that the average 13-17 year old sends more than 2,000 text messages per month. Compared with the total mobile Internet population, teens are much bigger consumers of social media, music, games, videos/movies and technology/science.

Parental use of advanced data services mirrors that of their tween kids. If their children text, then 80% of parents will text as well. Although following their kids’ lead on devices and media, parents still set limits. Six in ten forbid downloads onto their children’s phone for financial and security reasons.

TV times
Even as social media dominates press coverage, TV viewing is on the rise among children and teens. Younger children age 2–11 spend almost 102 hours per month watching traditional TV at home—a 17% increase from May of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009. The increasingly popular time-shifted TV option averaged 5:26 hours during the timeframe, a 26% year-over-year increase.

Traditional TV viewing expanded at a slower rate (13.5%) among teenagers than among younger kids—to 101+ hours, and teen time-shifted viewing showed a 35% growth rate with 4:54 hours of watching time. Interestingly, Internet use was down (-15%), to 10:22 hours per month. The biggest media gainer was video viewing on the Internet, where Hulu and YouTube helped spike time by 66% for a total 2:41 viewing hours. Teens deployed mobile phones to catch videos, spending 6:30 hours with mobile video streams—a 20% year-over-year increase.

Young enough
The debate rages on: what is the right age to give a child their own phone? The answer seems to be younger every year, and if you don’t give them a phone, they’ll just borrow one. In 2008, the average age when kids started to borrow a cell phone was 8.6 years; in 2009, it was down to just 8 years old. As to ownership, in 2008, a child typically was given a mobile phone at age 10.1 years; by 2009, it was down to 9.7 years old.

The next time you hear “everybody’s got one”, the fact is, that classic ploy may be true. By age 10, roughly half of children own a mobile phone. By age 11, six in ten own a mobile phone. By age 12, fully three-fourths of all children have their own mobile phone.

Game on
How do they use phones? Two-thirds of tween mobile phone owners took pictures with their camera phones in the last year. Half spent time playing the pre-installed games. Four in ten activated the speakerphone feature. Twenty-eight percent filmed a video clip, and 24% listened to the MP3 capability.

More than half of the youngest (age 8) mobile phone owners used their cell to send text messages in the last 12 months. That figure soared to 81% for 12-year-old mobile users. The vast majority of text messages were directed to friends and family (90%). All other cell phone uses tracked in the single digits, such as voting on TV shows (8%), buying a ringtone or music (9%), buying wallpaper or a screensaver (4%), buying a game (5%), responding to an ad (5%) or looking up their horoscope (4%).

Parental controls
Surprisingly, given all the publicity about cyber stalking and cyber bullies, more than half of parents do not apply any parental controls offered by service providers to their children’s cell phone usage—although the use of these paid-for controls is increasing. Among those who do assert these built-in controls, 20% limit the number of calls, texts or instant messages, followed by download limits (17%), talk time or voice minute allocations (16%), mobile website access limits (15%), locator services and restricted in/outgoing number access (13% each), time of day restrictions (11%), and alerts to unauthorized texts, IMs or callers (6% each).

While the use of paid-for controls may not be high, just about all parents restrict how tweens use their phone and six in ten prohibit downloads that incur charges. Not taking the phone to the dinner table and maintaining certain grades are other rules put in place by 42% and 40% of parents, respectively.

Coming challenges
From a media perspective, choice leads to fragmentation, and ultimately, divided consumer attention and diminished import for a single medium. Even as social media gains popularity among the general public and marketers, there is no accepted benchmark or measure of effectiveness, making it difficult to forecast or predict the impact of a campaign.

A particular challenge for companies wanting to incorporate social media into their communications arsenal is the blurred line between private and public information, given the highly personal nature of many postings. Advertising models are still in flux, exploring boundaries of ethics, taste and transparency.

Untapped potential
Social media presents a world of new possibilities. Not a better mousetrap, but a new operating DNA for interacting with consumers. It can serve as an early radar or warning system, alerting to trouble spots and yielding fresh insights.

For parents, old rules still govern new media. They will need to stay engaged, enrolled and involved in their children’s lives. The motto “trust but verify” applies. For advertisers, old rules also are still in force. The need for transparency and trustworthiness becomes amplified on new media circuits. Ultimately, the nature of new media will prove its value, as all parties engage in an interactive, ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation. Social media is organic and ever-evolving, constantly presenting new opportunities and challenges.

Kid Stuff
For more on children and their media habits, check back next month. We’ll be exploring television, DVD, DVR, VCR, on demand, online streaming and gaming preferences for children ages 2–11. The silver screen represents marketing gold!

According to the Nielsen Annual Real Estate Market Report, home shoppers are spending 4.5 hours a week on real estate web sites, with specialist web sites such as realesate.co.nz and trademeproperty.co.nz accounting for almost three of those hours each week.  Another 110 minutes was spent on search engines while 106 hours was spent on the sites of individual real estate agents.  The trend to turn to the Internet shows no signs of abating: real estate web site traffic in May 2009 was up 19 percent over the same month on 2008.

“The increased research taking place online is perhaps showing us that property buyers are getting a large amount of their information needs ticked off via the web before using other media options or physically going to see the property itself,” said Tony Boyte, Research Director of Nielsen New Zealand’s online division.

The Nielsen Annual Real Estate Market Report is based on a site-intercept survey on New Zealand real estate web sites conducted in May and June with a sample size of 1,206 respondents.

“Nielsen’s online data shows that about half of the U.S. population visited a social networking website in the last year and that number grows every quarter,” said Wils Corrigan, AVP, Research & Development, Nielsen Claritas. “The rising popularity of these sites and the deep engagement consumers have with them has advertisers and marketers asking for more and more detail as to which lifestyles should be targeted for their online advertising and promotions.”

Facebook vs Myspace

Through Claritas, Nielsen defines U.S. households in terms of 66 demographically and behaviorally distinct segments like “Young Digerati” or “Beltway Boomers.” When those segments are overlaid with the activity of Nielsen’s online panel of more than 200K, we see a marked difference in the demographic makeup of the two largest social networks, Facebook and MySpace.

• Facebook users have a largely upscale profile. The top third of lifestyle segments relative to affluence were 25% more likely to use Facebook than those in the lower third.
• The bottom third segments related to affluence are 37% more likely to use MySpace than those in the top third.
• Users of Facebook were also much more likely to use LinkedIn, a network geared towards business and professional networking, than those who use MySpace.

Bloggers more urban as well

According to Nielsen Claritas, the blogging and tweeting community at large isn’t necessarily more affluent, but bloggers and tweeters do live in more urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The penetration rates of the top two most visited blogging platforms (Blogger, Wordpress) and the most popular micro-blogging platform (Twitter) show that Nielsen’s 12 Urban lifestyle segments are more likely to blog and tweet than Nielsen’s 22 Town & Rural segments.

Not surprisingly those lifestyle segments most likely to blog and tweet also tend to use Facebook and LinkedIn more often than those segments that typically don’t blog or tweet. Case in point, the Urban lifestyle segments for Blogger are 18% more likely to be Facebook users and 140% more likely to be LinkedIn users than the below average segments.

About the methodology

Nielsen examined the seven most-visited social networking websites and platforms: Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, ClassmatesOnline, and LinkedIn. Website penetration by segment was calculated by dividing the number of unique visitors to the website per segment by the total number of households in each segment.

Jim O’Hara, President, Media Product Leadership, The Nielsen Company

The Findings

One of our primary tools for observing three screen behavior has been the TV/Internet Convergence Panel, which is made up of 1,000 households in the U.S. that formerly participated in our TV ratings panels. These households, accounting for almost 3,000 people, were asked to install a Nielsen software meter on their computers in addition to the meters these households had already permitted us to install on their televisions, enabling us to measure both Internet and television activity.

What we have found to date is that despite the initial presumptions and fears of some, media consumption has actually increased. Each of the three screens has its benefits and people are using them as complements, not as substitutes, for one another. With respect to TV and Internet usage, we found that a fair number of people are doing both simultaneously, though in relatively small increments per day – an average of ten minutes per day per person. In our multitasking culture, watching TV while checking e-mail or surfing the Internet has become more and more common: more than half of our panelists had some simultaneous activity. Among that group, 3.7% of the time they were watching television they were also on the Internet and 31.6% of the time they were online they were also watching television. What was rather unexpected was that this behavior was not limited to any one age demographic: a teen was as likely to be engaged in simultaneous usage as was someone 54 years old. And the amount of time they were doing this was comparable.

So who is sharing their time online with TV? Women age 25 and over and persons 35 and up are most likely to juggle the two media. Further, they tend to be above-average consumers of each platform. Simultaneous users watch 14 percent more TV a day and use the Internet 61 percent more than the average consumer. Clearly, during that expanded timeframe they are exposed to a large number of ads and the opportunity to reach them is greater.

Implications for Marketers

Until fairly recently, marketers would develop campaigns based on the individual medium – one for TV and another for the Internet. Often times, these campaigns would bear little resemblance to each other. But today, we know that doing so risks passing up an opportunity to reach a captive audience. The simultaneous usage phenomenon presents new marketing opportunities: the unique strengths of each medium can be leveraged to allow consumers to be reached – and allow them to reach back – in ways that they choose themselves.

For example, TV can deliver the call-to-action via advertising. The Internet can provide a convenient venue for the action, and enable the consumer to get more information about or actually purchase a product or service. Advertising that takes advantage of this linkage of platforms is already being implemented with particularly strong results.

To gauge the effectiveness of this concept, we looked at a few traditional retailers during the 2008 holiday season to see which of them were most successful in stimulating cross-platform behavior. In December, the highest percentage of people who watched TV while using retailer web sites went to Target.com Target was also among three retailer web sites (second to Walmart and before Best Buy) that were uniquely able to draw a high percentage of simultaneous Internet and TV users – 3.8 percent. Visitors to its web site were more likely to be watching TV while at the site, and 10.2 percent of Target.com visitors said that they had seen a Target commercial on TV. Based on these figures, it seems clear that the simultaneous use of the two media had a measurable effect on behavior.

All signs are that media consumption across screens will continue to grow. Advertisers and media outlets that develop ways to capitalize on consumer cross-platform experiences and leverage the strengths of each will likely benefit. Now more than ever, a call-to-action – be it to visit a web site for more information or to make a purchase – can yield an immediate reaction from the consumer using both TV and Internet. But regardless of the medium, the key to successful marketing is having the right message that can make a real impact with the target audience the advertiser wants to reach. With increasing numbers of consumers expanding their use of media, marketers have more opportunities than ever to do so.

We are now expanding the scope of the Convergence panel to include measurement of video viewing on mobile phones. So expect more from Nielsen on simultaneous usage, cross-platform measurement and marketing implications as the three screen evolution continues.