Nielsen pushes for more online transparency in Middle East

The Nielsen Company is confident that its online measurement services will help improve transparency in the region’s web industry and increase advertising spend on the medium.

Regional MD Piyush Mathur revealed that several publishers and prominent brands from the region including The Maktoob Group, PropertyFinder.ae, the ITP Group and Orange are already using the recently launched Market Intelligence service that provides detailed information on internet traffic.

Nielsen offers its solutions to 16 other countries and is set to drive the online advertising industry in the Middle East by using its global partnership with BPA to audit business publishers and lend a level of credibility to its figures. There are 35 million users online in the MENA region, highlighting the potential strength of the medium.

Reacting to comparisons that free tools such as Google AdPlanner and Analytics offer similar functionality, Mathur reiterated that Nielsen’s figures are audited and that the system offers a standardized manner of tagging and analysis, which differs from how Google works.

Nielsen is also working on introducing other online solutions from its global portfolio to the Middle East such as AdRelevance and BuzzMetrics over the next two years.

Tahir Khalil, associate director of Customised Research for the MENA and Pakistan region for Nielsen, stated that about 80% of all the blogs in the Middle East are in Arabic but the BuzzMetrics solution, which integrates data from nearly 100 million blogs, social networks, groups and other CGM platforms, doesn’t presently support the language and needs to be enhanced before it can be launched in the region.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Reply to Mr Murad
Posted by From Nielsen on Monday 13 July 2009 at 03:17 UAE time


You clearly are coming from the advertising industry. I wonder when will you people become a little broader minded and realize that not everything is about advertising.

Nielsen is a market research company servicing primarily the FMCG industry. Advertising research is a small part of a very broad spectrum of research that is offered. I'd suggest you do your homework before criticizing.

Too little too late!
Posted by Robert Murad, Dubai, UAE on Tuesday 30 June 2009 at 20:43 UAE time


Nielsen and all other traditional research providers have been resting on their laurels for the last 5 years or so when the advertising industry needed them the most.

The only reason why Nielsen are rolling in town all guns blazing is simply because they have been overtaken by non-traditional research and intelligence providers that are more committed to the GCC and the Middle East and have long deployed research and intelligence tools.

Nielsen is rolling AdRelevance in the next two years??? Who will subscribe to their competitive intelligence service knowing that most of the industry is already using an alternative service with data that spans back to 2007?

Too little too late. They would do the industry a better service to introduce TV People Meters in the GCC where most of the ad spend is still taking place rather than trying to fragment a still small online ad market.

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