Skip to content
News Center >

Nielsen Launches Digital Ad Ratings in China

4 minute read | May 2015

Developed in Conjunction with Industry Leader Tencent; Digital Ad Ratings Brings Accountability and Accelerates Growth of Digital Advertising in One of World’s Largest Markets

Beijing – May 28, 2015 – Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) today announced the launch of Digital Ad Ratings in China in collaboration with Tencent, further expanding the solution’s global footprint. Currently available in eight other markets (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, U.K. and U.S.), Digital Ad Ratings has become the industry standard for digital campaign measurement globally. In addition to China, Nielsen will be launching the service in six more markets this year. 

Digital Ad Ratings, powered in China by Tencent’s more than 800-million active user accounts and Nielsen’s high-quality calibration sources, provides the unique audience, reach, frequency and gross rating points (GRPs) for a campaign’s full digital audience across computers, tablets and smartphones in a way comparable to TV. 

The solution will bring to the market accountability and comparability for brand marketers, advertising agencies and publishers who have been seeking measurement to better understand the true audience of their digital campaigns across devices.

“The launch of Digital Ad Ratings in the Chinese market reflects Nielsen’s ability to grow and adapt services to meet the needs of clients in today’s fast-changing world,” said Yan Xuan, President of Greater China, Nielsen. “Given the explosive growth of online and mobile usage and Chinese consumers’ changing media habits, we believe the introduction of a robust, independent measurement standard for digital campaigns is essential to unlocking additional digital ad growth in China.”

“As China’s leading internet giant, Tencent shoulders the responsibility and mission for creating a set of standards for China’s Internet-based advertising’s ecosystem. Due to the explosive development of the Internet and a fragmented media landscape, the current measurement system for digital and mobile advertising needs to be further improved to ensure that it is independent, reliable and accurate,” said SY Lau, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and President of its Online Media Group (OMG). “Nielsen has taken the initiative and leveraged its global expertise to develop Digital Ad Ratings in China, while powering the platform with Tencent’s big data.”

“This is a really big milestone, it’s something that we’ve been waiting for. We all need these as advertisers. It will make our advertising much more efficient. I think it will actually change completely the way we talk with our consumers, the way we deal with data, and also just the way we target our advertising,” said Anthony Ho, Marketing Director – Media, Mondelez.

How Digital Ad Ratings Works

Due to the extremely fragmented nature of the Internet in China, a truly massive consumer panel is required to provide an accurate read of audience measurement. Digital Ad Ratings in China combines aggregated, anonymous data from Tencent’s hundreds of millions of active online users with data from Nielsen’s nationally representative establishment survey of 46,000 Chinese consumers to ensure the data is accurately adjusted to reflect the true demographics of audience reach of digital campaigns.

All results are delivered overnight via a user-friendly online interface, providing clients the ability to quickly assess their campaign results and optimize mid-flight.

Creating an Independent Standard in Measurement

In addition to Tencent, Nielsen will work with other companies in China to further the creation of an independent standard for digital advertising measurement and expects to welcome the participation of additional advertisers, media agencies and publishers.

“Not only will this tool give advertisers a clear picture about the effectiveness of their digital advertising investment, it will allow Tencent and other media companies to build a fair and systematic measurement system,” added Lau. “Moreover, it will give publishers the opportunity to improve the reach effectiveness of their own platform while also promoting the overall development of digital advertising in China.”

“With Tencent, Nielsen’s constant enhancement of the Digital Ad Ratings tool and the participation of more industry players in the future, we hope to create an industry standard for measuring digital campaign audiences. This will result in a huge advantage for advertisers, media agencies and publishers looking to optimize their digital ad spend and inventory,” Yan Xuan concluded. 

About Nielsen

Nielsen N.V. (NYSE: NLSN) is a global performance management company that provides a comprehensive understanding of what consumers Watch and Buy. Nielsen’s Watch segment provides media and advertising clients with Total Audience measurement services across all devices where content—video, audio and text—is consumed. The Buy segment offers consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers the industry’s only global view of retail performance measurement. By integrating information from its Watch and Buy segments and other data sources, Nielsen provides its clients with both world-class measurement as well as analytics that help improve performance. Nielsen, an S&P 500 company, has operations in over 100 countries that cover more than 90 percent of the world’s population. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com

CONTACTS

Asia Pacific: Sue Feng, 010-5812-9195, sue.feng@nielsen.comU.S.: Alana Johnson, 1+ 646-654-8391, alana.johnson@nielsen.com