Nielsen to introduce digital ad ratings to Ireland from October

Audience research company Nielsen will offer its Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) method of measuring online campaigns to Irish advertisers from October, it has told agencies and media owners.

Nielsen says DAR, which counts desktop, mobile and tablet audiences, is the digital equivalent of its next-day television ratings. Almost all of the biggest advertisers in the US and the UK already use it to track campaigns.

DAR works when advertisers ask Nielsen to place a "tag" on their ads. This allows the views to be counted by both Nielsen and its partner Facebook. The latter does not know the identity of the ad, but can pair the "tag" with demographic information such as age and gender for up to 2.4 million users in Ireland. The imperfect Facebook data is then "calibrated", using Nielsen consumer research, in order to correct expected quirks and anomalies.

"I always bring it back to accountability to the advertiser – you want the advertiser to feel there is accountability and transparency," says Nielsen's Megan Clarken.

The product is one stepping stone to a “total audience” measurement that will provide a much clearer picture of the value of digital media to advertisers. Nielsen’s US clients already use a product called Digital Content Ratings, which allows content companies to calculate online audiences in a manner comparable to traditional media ratings.

"We believe everyone in the same content space needs to speak the same language. YouTube needs to speak the same language as CBS, NBC and ABC," says Clarken.

As more viewing shifts to digital, it becomes increasingly important for Irish broadcasters to be able to count that audience alongside the traditional TAM Ireland/Nielsen figures when they are selling advertising.

A significant chunk of the viewing of dramas, including soap operas like RTÉ's Fair City and TV3's Red Rock, does not take place live. But while catch-up views via personal viewing recorders can be added to the live ratings, online views via RTÉ Player or 3 Player can't.

For both overnight and “consolidated” TV ratings (which includes seven-day catch-up via personal viewing recorders), Nielsen operates a representative panel of homes installed with “people meters”. It uses this panel to extrapolate the viewers for each minute of each programme and then divides by the number of minutes to get an average audience.

Online streaming figures, however, are a straight tally of the number of users who pressed or clicked play, regardless of whether the view was of the whole programme or just a few seconds.

Comparable measurement is "incredibly important", says Clarken, who cited the example of an NFL game reported to have won 15 million viewers for Yahoo (having been set to auto-play on the Yahoo home page). If this viewership had been measured in the same way as TV ratings, the number would have been 1.6 million.

“I think it’s a journey, that ‘J-word’,” says RTÉ commercial director Willie O’Reilly, who attended the Nielsen briefing in Dublin on Monday.

There is now “a route map” to total audience measurement in Ireland, he says, though it will likely take about three years and “some high-level maths” to get there.