IAB awards online measurement contract to Nielsen following tender process
IAB Australia has today announced that Nielsen has retained the contract to be preferred supplier for the provision of digital audience measurement services in Australia.
The announcement comes after a multi-stage tender which began in February and saw the company fight off rival bids from GFK who are thought to have bid in a consortium with Aztec Research, along with Comscore who bid with IPSOS and Roy Morgan Research who bid with Telstra.
Comscore and Roy Morgan were knocked out in the previous round leaving incumbent Nielsen and GFK as the final shortlist.
“After a long and rigorous process we are thrilled to finally announce Nielsen as our measurement provider,” said Alice Manners, CEO of IAB Australia.
“Their appointment firmly places Australia at the forefront of digital audience measurement globally and will help IAB ensure our industry remains transparent and healthy in years to come.”
According to the announcement a major factor in the choice of Nielsen was the company’s strengths in mobile measurement, one of the key criteria. The IAB had been collaborating with the incumbent on a pilot mobile study which released its first numbers into the size of the mobile and tablet audience in Australia, earlier this year.
Under the new contract Nielsen, will be contracted to provide a number of improvements including the introduction of smartphone and tablet ratings in by the first quarter of 2015; cross-digital ratings for desktops, smartphones and tablets by July 2015; the introduction of daily ratings for digital content – including video – in early 2016; and deeper and more local reporting across all aspects of online measurement.
Monique Perry, head of Nielsen’s Media Industry Group in Australia, said: “The entire team here at Nielsen fought hard for this. We are committed to innovative product development, have a passionate client service team and strong technical support. We are ecstatic to be chosen.”
Nielsen has held the contract for IAB preferred supplier of audience measurement, a contract worth millions of dollars since 2011, the contract was extended without a tender in 2013.
This year’s review technical processes were examined by a panel chaired by industry veteran and former Oztam CEO Ian Muir, while TressCox Lawyers oversaw the process.
Nic Christensen
Wow. Just wow. So the fact hey’ve done no “innovative product development” over the last bunch of years evidently wasn’t a factor.
And we’ll get APIs “within the next 3 years”. Brilliant.
User ID not verified.
Yeah….have to agree with WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!
& add on top of that some dubious numbers every month where someones numbers are wrong or dropped off somehow.
& one statement…i can already get daily numbers myself for my own sites traffic…..why couldn’t we just “pool” all this data (from a huge global tech giant) for a daily publisher report….BANG hello INNOVATION
User ID not verified.
Such an innovative idea Smiffy. I wonder why we didn’t do that a decade ago!
Hang on. We did. And we ended up with 130 million Australians online each month. Now THAT sets the bar extremely high for dubious numbers.
User ID not verified.
Nielsen should merge with the IAB.
User ID not verified.
yes we did sniffy – and everyone understood we were tracking unique devices and NOT an audience…..so really not a dubious number at all when you know what you’re looking at…..
now trying to crack down a user on multiple screen is crazy difficult but when tech companies can create a UID and cross reference that with say….Facebook i’d prefer this over using a “panel” or cross section of society and tracking JUST their internet habits.
I don’t doubt the work that’s gone into this review process and such and i know i wouldn’t want to be part of it all it’s just a great shame to hear ‘innovation’ is a big part of it all – so what were the past years all about then?
User ID not verified.
I love the Nielsen website – it’s theme is called “1990s Excel”
User ID not verified.
Smiffy, a lot of the past years was about breaking the industry’s addiction to traffic data and the various rorts used to pump up the traffic numbers, as well as the (still present) addiction to “THE BIG NUMBER”. We’re now pretty much about audiences, as it should be.
You are right about device/screen duplication – it is darned hard to measure and darned hard to de-duplicate. Doing it for one site is hard enough – doing it for any and all sites (and any combination thereof) is many orders of magnitude harder. UIDs provide only some assistance. Sandboxing means apps on the same smartphone aren’t easily de-duplicated. Third party data is a rich vein, but only when its biases and limits are known and taken into account (e.g. LinkedIn is business oriented, FB has a minimum age criteria etc. etc.).
User ID not verified.
All the innovative bids got rejected or never bid in the first place.
User ID not verified.