The service, which launched in Hong Kong and Singapore earlier this month, guages internet use by collecting visitor information from individual websites, promising to offer a cheaper and more accurate picture of online behaviour than representative panels of web users, which proved expensive to maintain and were skewed to surfing at home, rather than at work or in internet cafés.
"Market Intelligence gives advertisers and agencies the ability to track the effectiveness of their advertising investments using figures they can trust," said Forrest Didier, managing director of Nielsen//NetRatings for Asia-Pacific and Latin America. "This confidence has proven to be vital in unlocking internet advertiser spend where we launched the service previously."
Online adspend rose by 90 per cent in New Zealand within a year of Market Intelligence's rollout, Didier added. The measurement system is also available in Australia, but a Chinese service launched earlier this year has been suspended as a result of a Government review of media activity by foreign companies.
Lack of support caused Nielsen to start pulling the plug on most of its regional panels following the dotcom crash in 2001, winding up its Hong Kong panel earlier this year and its Singapore panel at the end of 2004. However, it still maintains panels in mature markets such as Australia and Japan, where it plans to use them to bolster the site-centric information from Marketing Intelligence.
Alice Manners, MD of mOne in Sinagpore, welcomed the greater accuracy offered by Nielsen's new tool, which would reduce wastage in media spend, but said more sites needed to come on board for it to realise its potential.
"It's a good start," she said. "Hopefully, publishers will realise the opportunities it does provide. Given Hong Kong and Singapore are contained markets, it would be a good opportunity for people to get on board." Didier said Nielsen has opted to recruit websites from certain sectors first, such as finance or travel sites, using these blocks to develop a broader overview of the market. "It will take some time to build these services," he said.
Nielsen has already wooed a number of major portals to agree to be audited for Market Intelligence, including Sina and Ming Pao in Hong Kong and MSN in Singapore. A Japan launch is expected soon.
