Breakthru Nielson Ratings For Online Campaigns

From our Linked-In marketing group, thanks to Will Richmond's Video-Nuze:

Anyone who has run a television campaign knows how important the metric of GRP's (Gross Rating Points) are in determining where to put your media buy dollars. Nielsen is the defacto standard when it comes to these ratings.   In online video much of a campaign or ads effectiveness has been determined by impression and clickthrough measurements. While they do offer some valuable insight into an ads effectiveness they don't help much in the design area of a media campaign. In other words how do you know the best places to put your online advertising dollars?  If we had a TV-style Gross Rating Points (GRP) metric then traditional TV ad dollars would flow more freely into online video campaigns.

 Nielsen announced yesterday, that 15 leading video and digital ad platforms delivering thousands of online video ad campaigns and billions of impressions - are integrating Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) for use by their clients in campaign planning and analysis. This is breakthrough stuff!  As Amit Seth, Nielsen's EVP of Global Media Products explained to me late yesterday, these new partners will help cement OCR as an "online GRP" helping them to establish accountability and ROI quantification, two pre-requisites for traditional TV advertisers.

 Amit said the missing piece for OCR has been the networks, platforms and exchanges that have become huge enablers of online video advertising. These entities have been eager to extend OCR as a data source to help clients better plan campaigns and continuously evaluate them. In short, these platforms understand that better accountability will drive more business for them. Importantly, OCR works across all connected and mobile devices, so campaigns delivered to iPads, connected TVs, gaming consoles, etc. are all supported. Amit said extending OCR to ads in apps will follow soon.

Nielsen is advocating a "3 R's" framework, which includes "Reach, Resonance and Reaction." Reach is the basis and is accomplished through OCR. Resonance is a measure of brand lift, which Nielsen is accomplishing via its recent acquisition of Vizu. And Reaction is measured through its suite of analytical services in its "Buy" segment that measure actual retail impact of specific campaigns. By deploying all 3 of these pieces, Nielsen believes it can provide advertisers a comprehensive ROI of their online video spending.

 This is a milestone....As OCR gains momentum, there is tremendous optimism about a healthy online video ad ecosystem!