Even more surprising was the degree of variability between the different media sellers. Nielsen found that while the three ad networks reached the campaign’s intended audience 20-30 percent of the time, the women’s interest site, due to its audience composition, was most successful at delivering the intended audience.

For more on this case study, download the report, Building Brands in a Cross-Platform World.

Looking across dozens of campaigns spanning hundreds of websites, the results were the same, showing that the web consistently delivers millions of impressions – if not tens of millions – to the wrong people.

In the same beauty care product campaign, the 213 million impressions tracked-to-date seems to be at a level that could generate significant reach. In reality, the campaign overall hit slightly more than 40 million people across all demographic segments —a 13.6 percent reach. After focusing in on women 18-34, the campaign reached only 10.5 million women.

Despite these numbers, Nielsen research shows that the web does in fact deliver audiences more efficiently than some popular TV programs with very broad audiences.

For more on these findings, download the paper: Reaching the Right Audiences Online: Early Findings from Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings.

In the study, Nielsen examined how exposure to Internet ad campaigns influenced brand measures such as ad recall and likeability, and whether the consumer said they were more likely to purchase the product after viewing the ad. The analysis showed that online ads do, on average, succeed in influencing brand engagement and opinion, particularly for ad recall and message association. However, the degree of positive brand impact largely depends on the strength of the ad itself.

The study then connected brand engagement results with actual offline sales measured by Nielsen. While based on a small number of cases to-date, the research showed that campaigns in which consumers reported an increase in purchase intent after viewing an online ad also showed a boost in offline product sales. Cases with flat purchase intent showed no significant change in sales.

Additionally, the research showed that the click-through rate for a given ad campaign showed no connection to sales lift and no measure of whether the message resonated with consumers.

• For more on these findings, download Beyond Clicks and Impressions: Examining the Relationship Between Online Advertising and Brand Building.

Social media sites are some of the most heavily visited and used sites on the Internet. Users of social media are among the most coveted for advertisers,  yet online ads are still largely under-represented in terms of their percentage of total ad spend. As more and more proof of the effectiveness of online advertising comes to light, however, advertisers are beginning to take note. In Southeast Asia for example, recent Nielsen research indicates that consumers are highly influenced by online advertising — much higher than the global average. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of SE Asian consumers said they were “highly” or “somewhat” influenced by web site advertisements on social media (compared to 60% globally). That number rises to 80 percent when ads have a social context, such as indicating which of a consumer’s friends have liked or followed the advertised brand.

Online ads that are delivered to consumers based on previous purchases or other web sites visited also resonated with SE Asian consumers, with 74 percent saying they found this technique “made their lives easier”, compared to just 58 percent globally. Consumers in Philippines and Vietnam were most receptive to such ads (83% and 82%, respectively).

Nearly seven of 10 (69%) SE Asian consumers have “liked” or followed a brand or company on social media, significantly higher than the global average of 52 percent and higher again in countries such as Vietnam (79%) and Philippines (75%). Perhaps most importantly, consumer generated media (consumer opinions posted online) is now one of the most trusted forms of media among SE Asian digital consumers. More than half (54%) completely or somewhat trust consumer opinions posted online.

As consumers in the region become more familiar with social networking platforms, their levels of confidence and sophistication in using social media increase. They tend to value and trust online content as a source of information. Online advertising can offer a high return on investment in this region, provided companies know precisely how to reach consumers.

As networks wrap up their yearly upfront ad sales, there has been no shortage of pontifications about how well (or not) online advertising fared in this year’s negotiations. Media companies are in a race to boost revenue from their online offerings. They know the audiences are there, but are unable to fully monetize their online inventory without the right metrics to prove its value in reaching their clients’ specific targets, relative to TV. On the other side of the fence, TV advertisers know their customers are online. But they don’t have enough evidence that their online media buys are reaching their desired audience well enough to justify allocating more of their ad dollars to the medium.

The answer to this fundamental problem lies in Nielsen’s new approach to online ad measurement which produces Reach, Frequency and Gross Rating Points (GRP) statistics, comparable to TV ratings.

Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings measures the true audience of an online ad campaign by combining Nielsen panel data with aggregated, anonymous demographic data from online data providers. Using this unique hybrid approach, Nielsen is able to measure online advertising campaigns of nearly any size, running nearly anywhere on the web.

This will help advertisers better understand how their media investments are performing against their online only and cross-media campaign goals.

Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, first announced last September, has been in beta testing since March and, after approximately 40 campaigns across 20+ brands and range of verticals, the preliminary findings have been enlightening:

1. We’re seeing audience sample coverage that’s unheard of in the industry.

Traditional panel sample coverage (the % of impressions of an ad campaign delivered to panelists) is typically less than 3 percent. Sample coverage within Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (defined as the % of impressions that can be directly tied to a logged-in user from a contributing data provider) is an average of 42 percent. This means Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings’ methodology, which is based on aggregated demos for millions of people, is able to show a highly accurate sample coverage, 20x that of traditional panel-based measurement. Sample Coverage was consistently high across all advertiser brand verticals and all publisher types.

2. We’re seeing high incidences of campaigns not reaching their desired audiences.

Online has typically been viewed as the most “targetable” medium, but with Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings’ ability to precisely measure actual audience delivery vs. desired audience delivery, preliminary findings suggest that audience delivery within targets for online campaigns is not much different from what’s occurring in TV. For example, an analysis of the campaigns showed that when comparing campaigns with narrow audience (less than 20 year age span or age + gender) vs. broad audience (greater than 20 year age span), narrowly defined demos typically delivered 30 percent on-target vs. 77 percent for broad. Age + Gender-specific campaigns exhibited the highest delivery outside of the desired audience (27% for age + gender vs. 75% for general).

In one instance, Nielsen Online Campaigns Ratings showed that, in a campaign in which a CPG advertiser intended to reach females 18-34 for a personal care product, 55% of the impressions were served to men.

This precise measurement of audience delivery will open up new opportunities for online advertising and answer the industry’s need for transparency and accountability.

Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings will continue its beta program through mid-Summer and will be commercially available on August 15, 2011

Ad Spending Overview

• $117B was spent on all U.S. advertising in 2009. 57% of all ad spending in 2009 went into Television, making it the largest medium for advertisers. Print media earned approximately 28% of ad dollars, while Internet earned 7% of all ad dollars.
• The top spending product category for national TV was Automotive with $3.4B spent in 2009. The most significant growth by any one category among the top 20 was mobile phones, with national TV spend growing almost 200% to $587M in 2009.
• Ad dollars spent in primetime in national television account for about 50% of total TV ad dollars.
• The 30-second commercial remains the television advertising standard in primetime, accounting for 54% of all commercials (2009). However, the number of 30-second commercials has decreased 5% in primetime, while the number of 15-second commercials has increased 6%.
• For more, including ad effectiveness data, download Nielsen Advertising Fact Sheet.

Event Video

On Monday, Steve Hasker, President of Media Services, The Nielsen Company, announced a “major step forward” in online advertising measurement, Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings.

On Tuesday, Jonathan Carson, CEO of Nielsen’s Telecom practice, presented findings from Nielsen’s Connected Devices Playbook, which measures the impact of iPads, Kindles and various other net-ready devices.

China’s growth in online advertising continues at a quick pace, reaching 4.06 billion RMB in the first quarter of 2010—a 52.7% increase over the same period in 2009. This trend is expected to continue for the remainder of the year. The Fashion industry was the top spender, with almost 18% market share. Half of the top 10 industries lost market share in the first quarter.

China’s advertising market kept up a fast pace in the first quarter of 2010, after enjoying a 39% year-over-year growth for 2009. More than 3,600 advertisers in China advertised online during this time—an increase of 36.2% from Q1 2009.

This is a good start for the Chinese online advertising industry. Despite the difficult economic environment many countries struggled through last year, China enjoyed growth, and saw tremendous increases. As more advertisers step into the online market and advertisers regain their confidence, this trend of rapid growth should continue into the remainder of 2010.

The Fashion category was the biggest spender, with a 17.7% of total market share. It is also a fast-growing industry, with market share increasing 3.3%, compared to Q1 of 2009. This top 10 industry played a major role in Q1, representing 87.6% share of the entire markets’ advertising value. Among the top 10, Real Estate is the only one that dropped in advertising value compared to 2009, leading to a 4.7% drop in market share. There were four other industries that also lost market share in Q1: Entertainment (-2.3%), Employment (-1.6%), Automotive (-0.2%) and Media (-0.2%).

For more information, please visit www.cr-nielsen.com.

We’ve heard from countless brand marketers about the need for guidance when it comes to measuring the value of social media advertising. It’s why we’ve made a major investment towards helping advertisers understand how to achieve their brand goals in a social context. Our joint report: Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression provides early insights from Nielsen’s BrandLift product which analyzed survey data from more than 800,000 Facebook users in response to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 brand advertisers.

While the medium of social media advertising is still a wild frontier for some, the BrandLift framework solves a number of advertiser concerns by providing quantifiable data that can be mapped to trusted advertising effectiveness benchmarks already in place: Ad Recall, Brand Awareness, and Purchase Intent.

Suggesting You “Become A Fan” Of Social Engagement
Study after study has shown that consumers trust their friends and peers more than anyone else when it comes to making a purchase decision. It’s critical that we understand advertising not just in terms of “paid” media, but also in terms of how “earned” media (advertising that is passed along or shared among to friends and beyond) and social advocacy contribute to campaigns. To that end, we took a closer look at 14 Facebook ad campaigns that incorporated the “Become A Fan” engagement unit and sliced the effectiveness results three different ways, by each of the types of ads available on Facebook: 1) Lift from a standard “Homepage Ad”; 2) Lift from an ad that featured social context or “Homepage ads with Social Context”; and 3) Lift from “Organic Ads,” newsfeed stories that are sent to friends of users who engage with advertising on a brand.

For those Homepage ads at the top of the marketing funnel, awareness increased on average by 4% between exposed and control audiences. Purchase intent also increased on average by 2% following ad exposure on Facebook.

Comparing the responses of those users who had seen ads with social context against users who saw ads with no social context from the same campaign, we saw a measurable lift in lift.

While exposure to the homepage ad itself increased ad recall, those users exposed to both the “paid ad” and the organic impression remembered the ad at three times the rate of those just exposed to the paid homepage ad. We saw a similar effect for the other two metrics evaluated. Homepage ads increased awareness of the product or brand by 4% on average, but exposure to both homepage ads and organic ads increased awareness by a delta of 13% versus the control group. Exposure to organic impressions also impacted purchase intent as well, increasing the impact of the ad from 2% to 8%.

For more on earned media, social advertising and the methodology behind the study, download Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression.

We invite you to ask questions, leave comments below. We’re love to hear your thoughts.

“All major indicators in the fourth quarter suggested that advertisers are more confident in turning to online advertising as economy picks up, as evidenced by a strong year-over-year growth in advertising expenditure, especially outperforming that of traditional media amidst a slow economy in the first three quarters of 2009,” said  Joseph Kam, Commercial Director, Nielsen Online, Hong Kong & Taiwan. “As we see from a full year perspective, an increase of 17 percent in total online consumer spending indicates that online advertising is gaining its competitiveness as compared to other traditional forms of media.”

More than 2,500 advertisers in Hong Kong advertised online from October to December in 2009, an increase of 137 percent from Q4 2008. The number of advertising campaigns has been doubled from 3,062 in Q4 2008 to 6,152 in Q4 2009, indicating a significant increase in importance of the online platform.

“The Internet is becoming a more competitive platform for advertisers to effectively reach their audience in a cost-effective way,” said Mr. Kam. “With more people turning online, spending an average of almost 20 hours online per week, more advertisers will leverage the Internet as a sufficient and efficient advertising platform to deliver messages across a large targeted group. Advertising follows eyeballs, and a well-targeted message will have higher relevance to people in the right locations and higher ROI.”

Before joining Nielsen, I spent most of my time as a marketer for major brands. Like many of my peers, I was risk averse when it came to where I put my money — especially online. A “volume, volume, volume” approach of 100 million ad impressions might work for sectors that rely on a direct response model (travel, insurance, etc.), but for brand marketers (auto, CPG, etc.), the focus needs to be more about making a big impression on the right person.

The Advertising Gap
Increasingly, the right place to find your brand’s ideal consumer is online. In the first three quarters of 2009, time spent online grew three percent, and the overall active digital universe is up nearly four percent based on recent figures. But the ad dollars haven’t followed.

For brand marketers to fill the gap created by internet activity vs. internet ad spend they need the confidence that they are not only reaching the right people but also that their advertising has had the desired impact.  To get there, we need to convince them of three basic things:

1. Convince them that advertising on the web reaches a desired audience efficiently.
2. Convince them that the advertising message is actually seen and has an impact on the consumer.
3. Convince them that a dollar spent on the web actually pays for itself in offline sales.

This will require a leap away from the impressions and clicks mindset towards a more precise, meaningful and 360 way of measuring brand campaigns. Let’s look at how we make all of this work for brand marketers like me the right way.

Providing Confidence

At Nielsen, we know that getting it right for clients means getting it right with the consumer first. In the last year alone, we’ve expanded online and offline panels and formed unique partnerships that help us better understand what consumers watch (tv, online, mobile) and what they buy. We continue to make significant investments in understanding the consumer by going  house to house, mansion to trailer, coast to coast. We taking that deep, diverse demographic intelligence and marry it with data from our 230,000 internet users to project a more focused understanding of the consumer against the entire online population.

We’re also innovating in the area of understanding attitudinal impact. The Nielsen BrandLift product leverages Facebook’s highly engaged (400 million and growing) users.

Finally,  our shopper panels and demographic slices are overlaid with TV viewing and online behavior, allowing us to measure both activity and impact across millions of households. Since 2004, we’ve conducted more than 500 studies showing the impact of online campaigns equating to somewhere in the area of $200MM worth of advertising on CPG purchases, and our recent joint venture with Catalina leverages their 50 million shoppers to expertly project ROI of both TV and online ads.

Predictions: Place your ad bets

1. Despite the current gap and economic stagnation, we will see an acceleration in the shift of brand dollars to the web.
   Losers: Those publishers who cling to impressions / clicks.
   Winners: Those who guarantee the delivery of working mom’s over 40 with two kids, two cars, or whatever their ideal audience is.
2. Marketers will make buys leveraging cross-platform information.
   Losers: Those who cannot express value in the wider media context.
   Winners: Those who understand their audience and how they use media across TV, Internet and Mobile.
3. Data quality will matter more and more.
   Losers: Those data providers whose conclusions fail in-market validation.
   Winners: Those who go to the extra effort and expense to deliver reliability.

In short, the future belongs to those who view the web in audience and brand-centric terms and who take full advantage of multi-dimensional brand metrics, across media to better understand what (and how and when) consumers watch and buy. The 360 approach must become the new normal if the advertising community is going to move more brand marketers to invest heavily on the web. The tools exist — it now just takes the willingness to adopt them.

*Adapted from a keynote presentation at OMMA Metrics & Measurement event