Last April, Nielsen invited some key members from media, publishing, media advertising and clientele to a short demonstration of the next wave of Nielsen’s innovative tools for determining Internet activity in the Philippines. The objective of the demonstration was to show the attendees what they were planning to do, why they were planning to do it, and how they were planning to execute it.
They hope that, with this more concrete knowledge of the Philippine internet users’ behaviour, advertisers can more effectively mount digital and online campaigns targeted towards the right audience. This, in turn, give our advertisers and clients more confidence in investing in online advertising.
Philippine User Data
For one thing, there is no hard and accurate data on the Philippine Internet users. Because Internet access is still varied, and a huge amount of traffic coming from net cafes instead of houses, the traffic data can get duplicated or inaccurate. Based on the known habits of Filipino internet users, it is very difficult to pinpoint the actual browsing and net-spending habits of Filipinos using assumptions based off of a small percentage of the net users.
Another thing is, according to the Universal McCann Social Media Study for 2010, since the Philippines is the most active in terms of social networks, photo sharing, blog reading and online video watching, a lot of the content coming from and going into the Philippines is user-generated—how can one track that kind of content?
The Plan
Nielsen proposes a system that will allow them to actually survey the ENTIRE net population of the Philippines, by implementing their data collection tools into local websites, blogs, social networks, etc in the Philippines. And this won’t just include big sites or ad networks—even the smaller scale blogs, pages and independent social networks will be included.
How they plan to do it of course is their forte. But from my understanding, it will be like placing Google analytics on every single online property viewable by Filipinos—it’s like tracking Pinoys every move online. Is this legal and, above all, moral? Yes, of course, it is because Nielsen will not collect personal data, but will however, collect web and traffic data, which can be used to make more accurate inferences and projections of user behaviour of a particular demographic.
Is it effective? Very. So much so that they were able to do this in 2004 to 2007 for New Zealand and in 2007 for Hong Kong, where they were able to increase online ad spend in those countries by 108 percent (over the three years in New Zealand) and over 42 percent (Q1 to Q3 of 2007 alone for Hong Kong).
Next Steps
Nielsen’s data collection system is already underway and they are already expecting a beta version to be out this coming May.
Investing in this project will allow advertisers to better understand the digital landscape of the Philippines and give them more ammunition for convincing clients to invest more for their digital spending. Even better, it won’t cost an arm and a leg—the more companies, agencies and media outfits that invest in the project, the more affordable it will be. In fact, they are already studying price points that will make it affordable for all levels of digital advertising clients.
For more information do get in touch with Eric V. Barrera, Director of Client Service Media for The Nielsen Company (jerico.barera@nielsen.com).
