Forrest Didier, Managing Director, Asia Pac-Latin America, Nielsen-NetRatings

Internet spends have already gone up in India in the last year, but people are still doing it without any data or research to base their decisions on. Advertising accelerates when there is measurement. Nielsen Media Research launched Hispanic panel in the US and advertising on the panel increased significantly following that. NetRatings launched in New Zealand and advertising almost doubled in one year of that. Clients, particularly in markets like India, are starved of some kind of information. Right now, they have to depend on company server logs, which can be inflated for any number of reasons. It’s not good to trust server logs.

The Internet medium has come under the scanner on various forums and every media expert speaks of the growth in the medium and the fact that it is set to scale greater heights. The component of measurement is going to play a key role in this medium as well and Nielsen Media Research’s NetRatings, that is a string international player in the space, is looking at India closely.

In this interview with Noor Fathima Warsia, Forrest Didier, MD, Nielsen-NetRatings, Asia Pac-Latin America speaks on the role that measurement plays in developing the medium and his perception of the India Internet market.

Q. You mentioned that you need website cooperation to be able to track it. Have you had any experience where websites are not participating?

Yes, but it is an educational process. Some sites don’t believe that by sharing and becoming a part of the industry group, which would accurately reflect rankings, advertising will flourish. They are very concerned that if a report is published and they are not a particular rank, advertisers will shun them. We try to convince them that if they are not a part of bodies like this, that is damaging because advertisers will not rely on their information. People would definitely think that you have something to hide.

Another thing we try and do is convince clients that even if you may not be the number one or two or three in terms of page impression or a unique audience, there are a number of different facets of the ways in which you can sell communication on the site and communicate the effectiveness on your site. Take the example of Heineken – 90 per cent of its TG is male in the 25-29 age bracket. Now, this is the TG that is very interested in the kind of content that news websites produce. If you look at the overall share, new websites will be very low, but they still are the best bet for Heineken.

Our information helps them sell in that way. For an advertiser, we talk about streaming capabilities – someone goes to their site and spends an hour on that site, it means all kinds of new advertising opportunities. It’s not important that you are number one – there is always something about the site that would be interesting to an advertiser.

Absolutely, Internet spends have already gone up in India in the last year, but people are still doing it without any data or research to base their decisions on. Advertising accelerates when there is measurement. Nielsen Media Research launched Hispanic panel in the US and advertising on the panel increased significantly following that. NetRatings launched in New Zealand and advertising almost doubled in one year of that.

Clients, particularly in markets like India, are starved of some kind of information. Right now, they have to depend on company server logs, which can be inflated for any number of reasons. It’s not good to trust server logs. There are robot technologies out there that just visit these sites for any kind of information and are really not unique visitors. All these points are factored once you have a measurement system in place.

India, like other developing countries that are seeing a sudden pace in the digital space, are passing up the whole dial-up phenomenon and directly taking on broadband. This is an important point to observe as this implies that Internet people in India have let go of a complete stage and will directly look out for advanced levels of interactivity and content in the digital space. I think this brings up the whole issue of having infrastructure in broadband in place to structure this growth. Advertisers are aware of the power of the Indian market place. With players like Intel already looking at the market seriously and everything else that is happening here, I think India is already looking at the next level of technological changes as well.

It really only requires cooperation of the sites themselves. The approach we use in many markets is to try to establish one vertical, say the publishers' portals of the industry in one segment, we would get them to insert in a line of code on the pages of their website and then drop cookies on visitors to the website. We use them to track the path through the website and use pop-up surveys to determine the demographics of the visitors to that particular website.

At preset, advertisers and agencies know they need to be on the Internet, but they have nothing to help them do that. With measurement, they can do all kinds of media planning and that gives them a great degree of comfort that you can advertise effectively online. Heineken is an example of that. Targeted at males – 25 to 29 years, the brand has earmarked its entire first leg of a massive campaign on the Internet. With measurement, they have been able to figure out which sites – obvious and not so obvious – their TG would be on, and they can do very targeted marketing.

If a visitor goes to a certain page and spends time on it, you have a wealth of information coming from that and this provides opportunities on the kinds of advertising that can be done. This information will help advertising agencies. Internet, being the most verifiable medium, can actually give information on if the advertiser actually reached his TG and in the right numbers.

When we process the information we get from this, the client gets two main benefits. One is what we call the sec-census product. It is a web analytic tool that helps them to evaluate the effectiveness of their own site. How are visitors coming to his site? How are they navigating through the site? How many visitors does he lose when they come to a page? They can see what the problem is with that section. They can use this information to redesign the site itself to retain and bring in more people and make surfing of the site a better experience.

The second is at the market level and advertising driven application. Sites need to promote themselves to the advertisers in the market. Server logs are a problem. We have tried the panel approaches in some markets, but they have their drawbacks as the cost of these panels is prohibitively expensive, especially for a market like India. Also, panels don’t help you track the café audience and clients are not too conformable too, as they don’t want anyone to plug anything on their work machines. There are other issues with ISP log.

It certainly holds back our growth somewhat. But our hope is that we build enough consensus report in the market place. Then there are cases like New Zealand, where everyone agreed to participate. All agencies have decided that they aren’t going to place advertising on a particular site unless it has some Nielsen NetRatings. We need to be able to have these tools – so if they don’t participate, they are losing out. The site not participating is not only hurting itself, but also not helping the industry in being transparent.

We do basic audience measurement services and in addition, we offer additional analytical services that would help client understand information better and how to act upon it. We help clients add relevance, help them understand trends and evaluate advertising on the Internet at the categorical level, offering them a tactical tool. We have helped them do post-campaign reach and frequency evaluations as well. In addition, we hold conferences, training sessions and concentrate on interacting and understanding from our clients on what the next ‘thing’ is that can be expected in the industry.

Don’t bury your heads in the sand and do understand the importance of measurement and the need to embrace it. Transparency leads to increase in trust in the information and in the market place. E-government will catch up as the medium develops more and it is time that steps are being taken to structure that as well.

One reason I am here is that. I am meeting various bodies and players to work on how we can come in the market and what is the best route to do that.

Internet penetration is on top of the list. Markets like India and China are said to have low penetration, but I think it is misleading to look at it like that. Internet penetration in India is at 3 per cent, and if you throw in the cyber cafes, 15 per cent of India's population can access the Internet. That percentage, of over a billion people, is no small number. The number of people is important as that presents market opportunity to advertisers and subsequently creates a chance to generate e-commerce activity. Then there is e-government that shapes up.

I think a measurement system is secondary. When the measurement is in place and ad effectiveness can be traced, advertising follows in the medium. With more funds coming in, investments increase on every count, developing the sector. I think these are the two main drivers of Internet growth in any market.

Our priorities are set a lot by our clients, and let me tell you that there are many international clients that are pushing us to get into India and other South East Asian markets. Before entering a market, we look at it closely enough to know what the market opportunity is and the number of users present in the market. We also look at the growth rate of the Internet and where it is headed.

I can speak more from the NetRatings point of view here. What we do is to filter out all of the robot access. We go by the browser-based approach, which is broadest measure of the audience. It would measure audience access from anywhere – home, work, Internet cafes, mobile access – no matter where you are, and this is a very broad measure. Once there is some measurement in the market place and there is information available based on that, advertisers and agencies can plan on campaigns on what portion of their budget do they spend online and which are the sites they spend this on – down to the detail of which pages of the sites as well.