What you need to know:

• Nielsen is launching its Digital Content Ratings, powered by Identity System, next month, recommitting to the Australian market despite losing the three-year IAB tender as the preferred audience supplier.
• Monique Perry, Nielsen’s Managing Director Pacific, said she believed there was appetite for the company’s content measurement product after the growth and take-up of Digital Ad Ratings, which measures ad reach, earlier this year.
• Perry conceded it had been a tough year for Nielsen, which has been rebuilding after the loss of an important data partnership with Facebook.
• “We paid the ultimate price,” Perry said. “But our commitment remains.”

Global audience measurement firm Nielsen is gearing up for an Australian measurement melee, bringing a redesigned digital audience platform to compete with Ipsos despite losing the ‘exclusive and preferred supplier’ endorsement of industry group, IAB Australia.

Nielsen’s Pacific Managing Director, Monique Perry, has unveiled the company’s new Digital Content Ratings product, citing its new identity system and sheer scale – a 10,000-strong panel and 10 million Australian IDs deduplicated against 57 million devices – as reasons it is well placed to continue serving the local market.

Conceding her company had fallen short over the past year after losing a crucial data alliance with Facebook, Perry said it had been a tough 12 months and Nielsen had “paid the ultimate price”. Senior industry players had been critical of the company for being slow-moving and ineffective.

“I appreciate it was tough. There was data delays and things that were caused by a single provider. And we learnt from that. And every step along the way we learnt from that. And I feel like this market had to do a lot of the learning,” she said.

“We paid the ultimate price there. But our commitment remains, globally and locally, to progress audience measurement. Digital is no different. Whether it be the ads or the content, that is no different. And I feel like we have something to offer.”

In August last year, IAB Australia announced Ipsos had been appointed, on a three-year term, as the industry’s “exclusive and preferred supplier for the planning, buy and reporting of digital audience measurement data in Australia”. While Ipsos iris has not yet rolled out, it is understood to be imminent.

Nielsen has spent the past year rebuilding its data inputs after losing a crucial alliance with Facebook, aka Meta. Earlier this year, it launched a new Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) product powered by Unpacked by Flybuys, The Trade Desk, Kochava, Equifax, and other data partners. DAR has been “growing month on month” and is used by all the major holding groups, Perry said. It measures display and video ads across desktop, mobile and tablet, with plans to add connected TV but no firm timeline. 

From sometime next month, in September, Nielsen will turn on its Digital Content Ratings (DCR) solution, which is underpinned by the same data as its ad ratings product. That will mean daily, weekly and monthly audience data will be available for small and large sites. DCR first launched earlier this year in Italy.

Advertiser choice

Nielsen’s intensified commitment to the Australian audience measurement market means major advertisers and holding groups will need to choose between the IAB-endorsed Ipsos and the formerly-endorsed Nielsen – or both. They would be reluctant to pay twice for the same service.

Perry said Nielsen’s ad ratings product is used widely and the content ratings product would be a natural fit. But she admitted it was unclear what the take-up would be.

“That pitch looks like a media quality panel at the foundation, across desktop, mobile, and tablet. It's the tags that we've had in place for decades now. That tag is an important feature of the measurement. And then it's an identity system that's powering up 55 million devices and 10 million identities to give scale to measurement,” Perry said.

“Whenever you look at a measurement that has all those different tools in the toolkit, it just allows you to deliver a comprehensive, inclusive measurement. So that will be the conversation. It's consistent with ad measurement.”

Asked whether Nielsen would compete for the IAB’s endorsement when the digital audience data supplier tender came up again, in 2025, Perry said: “Nielson is committed to digital measurement in the Australian market. We're committed to measuring ads, and we're committed to measuring content, and we're committed to continuing to progress that measurement. That's the commitment.”

Two providers

It is not the first time there have been two competing providers of measurement data in one sector. Roy Morgan lost the contract for monthly digital readership figures nine years ago to publisher-funded Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA), which relied on Ipsos survey data. In April last year, however, Roy Morgan’s ‘Total News’ metric was re-appointed by ThinkNewsBrands after a tender process.

Unlike television ratings and OzTam, for example, digital measurement has never been an industry funded venture. There can be multiple parties vying for the best results and methodology, negotiating individual data contracts with customers.

“Nielsen has been delivering digital audience measurement to this market since 1999. There have been lots of different research firms who’ve provided digital measurement in the market over the years. There’s never been a single industry-funded contract in digital measurement,” Perry said. “It was there before any industry bodies for digital came along.”

Future proof

Perry said the Digital Content Ratings, powered by the new Identity System, would be immune from major shifts in privacy. The Federal Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, has flagged sweeping privacy changes are due by the end of the year.

“The identity system is built with the most complex markets as the base level,” Perry said. “We're in 17 markets now all over Europe … I feel confident the way this is being built is with privacy at the heart of it.”