Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings Service: A Great Step Forward -- or Not
Seriously, it's hard to tell whether Nielsen's new Online Campaign Ratings service -- which will measure online advertising using metrics comparable to those in TV -- is a big step forward for digital advertising, or one massive step back.
The new service, which Nielsen announced yesterday as part of Advertising Week in New York, promises to measure ads using old-school metrics like reach, frequency and gross ratings points. Without going into too much detail, that basically means the new online ratings will measure how many people saw an ad, how often they saw it, and the overall rating for the ad across the online universe.
While that works fine for TV commercials, since all viewers are expected to do is look at them -- it's pretty counter-intuitive in online, where the hope has always been that people might actually interact with the advertising, by clicking on it, sharing it, or whatever. The ads were never meant to be static.
So, after about fifteen years of online ad execs and digital publishers trying to prove why their medium is different, does this ratings service really mean that it was the same all along? Well, no. But, if you follow the business closely, you know that for years there has been pressure on online advertising to act like its offline counterpart, so that advertisers can measure across platforms on an apples-to-apples basis; it speaks volumes that an initial test of the service, which will be conducted in the fourth quarter, includes major advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Verizon Wireless. Nielsen is giving advertisers what they want.
While the complaints about how to measure across platforms have always sounded like excuses to me -- measurement sophistication seems like it should match the sophistication of each medium -- this initiative solves the perceived cross-platform problem, for better or worse. It essentially dumbs down online advertising to its lowest common measurement denominator. (Here's a video explaining how the service works.)
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