July 13 – The incredible growth of China’s digital media landscape continues to shift the market. Over the past three years, digital media investment has surpassed traditional media, making China the second biggest digital media market in the world. Meanwhile, advertising technologies have been constantly upgraded, with new solutions frequently launched by industry players. The evolution of global and local digital advertising markets also creates new demand for advertising technologies, and requires better third-party digital advertising measurement solutions.
Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) is an independent, third-party measurement solution that targets the digital advertising industry. Since its inception in 2008, DAR has contributed to the industry by maintaining dedication to its highly transparent and unbiased measurement methodology. At present, DAR covers 34 countries and markets and is leveraged by the world’s top 25 advertisers, ranked by advertising spend, to measure the effectiveness of their digital campaigns. Over the past three years since Nielsen DAR’s launch in China, the solution has evolved for the Chinese market. Nielsen has forged long-lasting cooperation with many influential local digital media partners, as well as more than 200 global and local brands. At the same time, DAR has helped to transform China’s advertising landscape by ushering in a new level of standardization and accountability.
Over the past year, Nielsen has invested heavily in the optimization of DAR in China. By combining global perspective with local market insights, Nielsen has created an independent, cutting-edge measurement solution that offers a game-changing read of digital viewership, engagement, and on-target audience impressions.
Maxwell Xu, Unilever North Asia Head of Media, said, “The incredible pace of development within digital marketing requires constant evolution of advertising technology. Whether it is data reliability or marketing effectiveness, we hope to see more big data solutions devised to provide better decision-making support for digital marketing efforts. We also expect to see the continued exploration of advertising technologies and the launch of additional solutions.”
Lan Yao, Managing Director of Digital Media of GroupM Trading China, said, “GroupM advocates optimizing marketing performance through advertising technology and data analysis. We think digital advertising will continue to evolve and be driven by Nielsen’s measurement solutions and those of other organizations. These solutions will help advertisers reach audiences faster and measure effects more accurately, and thus optimize marketing communication.”
Reliability and objectivity is essential
With the rapid development of digital advertising, ad technologies and digital ad measurement has seen an emergence of many new solutions. With the nature of third-party digital advertising measurement in mind, Nielsen DAR has insisted on its mission and worked to develop independent, transparent and compliant third-party digital advertising measurement solutions. Its big data methodology and rigorous quality control determine if audience measurement is accurate, reliable and effective.
Since the beginning of Nielsen’s partnership with Facebook in the US where DAR was first established, to the cooperation with Tencent and Weibo in China, Nielsen has firmly held an objective and transparent standard for the continued development of the solution.
Kiki Fan, General Manager of Key Account Management, Tencent OMG, said when talking about the cooperation between Nielsen and Tencent, “We’ve partnered with Nielsen DAR and together we launched this industry leading digital measurement solution within China. By combining Tencent’s big data and Nielsen’s measurement and expert analysis, we’ve founded DAR, a ground-breaking methodology for leveraging big data to power a game-changing digital advertising solution.”
A solution that leverages global perspective and local, China market insights
Nielsen’s global perspective, coupled with China market insights are the principle for Nielsen’s media business in China. Nielsen China leverages globally tested data science methodologies and quality control standards, and then independently adapts these to the China market by local teams and under local oversight and operation. By adapting globally verified methodologies with locally specific configurations and specialization, Nielsen has created a solution perfectly adjusted for China’s quickly evolving digital landscape.
Apart from DAR, Nielsen will continue to launch solutions serving digital marketing and advertising in China, such as brand effect measurement, multi-media marketing attribution and marketing cloud platforms. These solutions provide the confidence for decision-making within digital marketing and advertising in planning and execution.
Zhenggang Fu, Vice President of Sales of iQIYI, said, “We’re happy to push forward the development of industry standards alongside our peers to jointly promote the healthy development of the industry with the China Advertising Association. As advertisers seek for upgraded digital solutions, we’ll cooperate with third-party measurement companies with an open attitude, so as to meet the tougher requirements of advertisers and better ensure the quality of media platforms. Nielsen is the world’s leading data provider. We hope to maintain positive cooperation with Nielsen and jointly contribute to the positive development of the industry.”
Jun Fang, CMO Assistant of Alibaba, said, “As a leading video and media platform, Youku has always valued precise and high quality video advertising measurement. In China, digital advertising is constantly evolving. We’ll further collaborate with Nielsen on digital media measurement solutions, so as to better serve brand advertisers and advance the development of the market.”
Cohesive data and technology cooperation
Changes in global and local digital advertising markets trigger new demand for advertising technologies.
In the big data field, Nielsen has established close partnerships with Tencent, Weibo, JD, Suning and China Telecom on audience measurement and marketing effectiveness analysis.
In the field of big data processing, Nielsen has reached strategic cooperation with local distributed big data enterprises to enable flexible development and deployment of customized big data processing.
In the field of advertising data quality, Nielsen not only takes for reference the global IAB/MRC standards, but also optimizes local data identification based on China’s media data environment and enables analysis of client data across platforms based on IP analysis. Moreover, Nielsen has worked alongside local digital advertising partners to be able to better understand the demographics of digital audiences.
In the smart TV field, Nielsen collaborates with local smart TV big data manufacturers on the measurement of smart TV content and audience identification. Nielsen also participates in the establishment of multi-screen big data research to study smart TV viewing behaviors at home in order to create a more accurate picture of consumers’ viewing habits.
About Nielsen
Nielsen (NYSE Stock Code: NLSN) is a global measurement and data analysis company that provides the most comprehensive and trustworthy consumer insights and global market information. By integrating Nielsen’s unique data with other data sources, our research approaches are aimed to help global clients better understand current market conditions, judge future trends and devise the best strategies based on research insights. Over the past nine decades, Nielsen has upheld the highly scientific and rigorous innovation spirit and constantly developed new approaches to help media, advertising, retail, FMCG and other industries meet critical challenges. Nielsen is one of the S&P 500 enterprises, with presence in more than 100 countries and regions across the globe and covering 90% of the world’s population. For more information, please visit www.nielsen.com