Nielsen slams new AMAA website auditing service: ‘we’re the online currency’
Monique Perry
Nielsen has attacked the Audited Media Association of Australia’s (AMAA) new measurement service, which was announced last week, and called on the industry to support it as the approved metric rather than “muddying the water with mistruths”.
In a strongly worded statement to Mumbrella Monique Perry, head of media at audience measurement firm Nielsen, rejected suggestions the endorsed analytics platform could be used for Australia’s online currency pointing to the small percentage of traffic measured by the AMAA and its partner analytics platform Comscore.
“Nielsen is the IAB Australia preferred supplier for online audience measurement, measuring 99 per cent of all tagged traffic in Australia. Its constituents are the publishers and agencies managing nearly all online advertising and who rely on Nielsen to provide the currency measure on what is being watched and read in Australia,” said Perry in the statement entitled ‘time for some industry supporting behaviour’.
“At its most generous, AMAA measures just one per cent of online traffic in Australia. Therefore, we reject the notion that the AMAA believe they have ‘online currency’.” The AMAA has declined to comment.
The AMAA has previously said the service aims to provide media agencies with a range of audited metrics to online figures. Comscore lost out to Nielsen in the 2011 IAB tender process for being the approved metric to measure online audiences, using both a consumer panel and tags on sites.
Perry also said while the AMAA has an important role in monitoring print circulations, they were not capable of assisting media agencies across multiple channels.
“While the AMAA plays a valuable role for a certain small part of the sector, it doesn’t help with agency planning for the vast majority of media platforms. And this misconstrues the metrics the industry itself has built with a recognised leader in measurement,” said Perry.
Last week Ricky Chanana, chairman of the newly formed AMAA Digital Working Committee (DWC) which oversees the service. said it would give media buyers an audited product and greater piece of mind.
“(The new service) just gives a media agency that extra element of satisfaction that someone is policing the numbers because at this stage Nielsen’s market intelligence product doesn’t have any auditing,” said Chanana who is also national digital & trading director of Maxus Global.
Nielsen has rejected these suggestions and argued the AMAA lacks the resources to provide proper auditing.
“We also reject comments about real data integrity,” said Perry. “While the AMAA say they will audit tags, it’s a very different thing to then take the serious and robust step of data integrity. This takes process, skills and real investment. ”
Nielsen’s tagging of websites, the means by which website views on a page are counted, has been a contentious issue this year in the online news category where publishers such as News Corp Australia, Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment have all been jockeying for top billing.
The audience company has faced questions over the tagging of website first in March, when it was forced to reissue its rankings after a mistake saw Ninemsn fall from second to third while in July News Corp video census data suddenly collapsed. The numbers for News’s video views returned the next month after the tagging issue was addressed.
Perry said Nielsen has a reputation for innovation and rigour in online measurement and they were best placed to check and verify tags of publishers.
“Since the mid-1990’s Nielsen has built a reputation in Australia for innovation and rigour in its online measurements,” said Perry, “When gathering data, Nielsen will not only check the tags but will then cross-check against trend, other sites, market and category variance – and in many cases work alongside online publishers themselves.
“This is an environment that is prone to upswings and downswings – a pay-wall goes up, a site goes down, a new entrant arrives, an app is launched. These are all things that Nielsen has checks and balances for, and brings global best practice to Australia. And in many cases we are now exporting our industry offering to other markets because it’s been proven to be robust, valuable and rigorous.”
Nielsen concluded with a fiery statement calling on the AMAA to “find its own role in the market” and telling the industry to support “itself” by avoiding “muddying the water with mistruths” and questioning the audience measurement company and its online metrics.
“We wish the AMAA every success. Over time it will find its own role in the market, but until then we hope for the industry’s sake it will focus on building support for itself rather than muddying the water with mistruths and questioning the industry-leading and endorsed metric,” said Perry.
The AMAA decline the opportunity to respond to Perry remarks.
The Media Federation of Australia has not formally endorsed the new AMAA measurement service but was consulted during the process for creating the new AMAA online measurement service.
“The MFA supports initiatives that provide greater transparency in media measurement,” said MFA CEO Sophie Madden. “We believe the AMAA’s audit of website traffic is complementary to the Nielsen Hybrid audience measurement, which the MFA co-endorsed with the IAB and AANA in 2011.
“The AMAA service will provide the opportunity for niche publishers which collectively represent around 1% of all Australian on-line traffic, but due to statistical issues cannot be reported in the Nielsen Hybrid audience data, to all pass through the same website traffic audit ensuring that they will all be on a level playing field when reporting their traffic data to the market.”
Nic Christensen
Nielsen’s full statement can be read below:
Monique Perry, Head of Media at Nielsen writes in response to the recent AMAA piece in Mumbrella:
Nielsen is the IAB Australia preferred supplier for online audience measurement, measuring 99% of all tagged traffic in Australia. Its constituents are the publishers and agencies managing nearly all online advertising and who rely on Nielsen to provide the currency measure on what is being watched and read in Australia. At its most generous, AMAA measures just 1% of online traffic in Australia.
Therefore, we reject the notion that the AMAA believe they have “online currency”. While the AMAA plays a valuable role for a certain small part of the sector, it doesn’t help with agency planning for the vast majority of media platforms. And this misconstrues the metrics the industry itself has built with a recognised leader in measurement.
We also reject comments about real data integrity. While the AMAA say they will audit tags, it’s a very different thing to then take the serious and robust step of data integrity. This takes process, skills and real investment.
Since the mid-1990’s Nielsen has built a reputation in Australia for innovation and rigour in its online measurements. When gathering data, Nielsen will not only check the tags but will then cross-check against trend, other sites, market and category variance – and in many cases work alongside online publishers themselves. This is an environment that is prone to upswings and downswings – a pay-wall goes up, a site goes down, a new entrant arrives, an app is launched. These are all things that Nielsen has checks and balances for, and brings global best practice to Australia. And in many cases we are now exporting our industry offering to other markets because it’s been proven to be robust, valuable and rigorous.
We wish the AMAA every success. Over time it will find its own role in the market, but until then we hope for the industry’s sake it will focus on building support for itself rather than muddying the water with mistruths and questioning the industry-leading and endorsed metric.
voodoo, the lot of them
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amma… emma… blah, blah.
We are seeing the complete screw over of research.
Fair enough we all knew/know that Neilsen and Roy Morgan etc were far from perfect, however they were at least mostly independent.
The proliferation of self serving measurement companies and so called auditors will lead to a complete distrust by advertisers.
On the good side, good sales people will become even more valuable as the only difference will be the people selling the products.
By the way, all of my posts have been independently audited by ABBA, no not the band (although Bjorn has professed an appreciation of my words) the australian bullshit brokers association.
Data is pointless if it is wrong
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99% of all TAGGED sites? That’s a nice spin on the fact that Nielsen only has tags on a small portion of the planet’s websites, compared to ComScore which is widely used as a GLOBAL standard and currency. Nielsen Panther, 60% of the time, it works every time!
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Nielson data is 50-70% accurate – every time! – it stings the nostrils.
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Blah, blah, blah… There are more outlandish claims here than in a typical Nielsen data set!!
Perhaps Monique needs to get out more and expand her horizons. 99%? Really??
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Did someone actually call Nielsen independent?
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Why does Nielsen think they are entitled to be the only source of information in the market?
Concentrate on your own product Nielsen, don’t bag others. You are the “industry leader”, and should act like it, not like a churlish bully.
The fact you’re going public with bagging a fledgling start-up in measurement services, gives the competition you’re talking about even more coverage.
As a media buyer, I’ll be making sure we give all the measurement systems a good look, to try and deliver better value for our customers.
Henry
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So Confused, please explain who you think Nielsen is dependent on?
And poor old Global Publisher, you seem to have missed or misunderstood the words “all tagged traffic in Australia”. I hope your proof-readers are better than your posting.
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I’ve got to ask.
WTF does “measuring 99% of all tagged traffic in Australia” actually mean?
I know Nielsen read the comments so please answer Monique.
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No matter how you skin this cat it ain’t meowing.
What a ridiculous statement to make!
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