MillsMash

Ok, I was looking forward to Nielsens presentation on 30th of June 2009. It was billed as “Launch of Nielsen Online Media Measurements for MENA” and they said “The Nielsen Company … will announce the statistics for participating website traffic in the (MENA) region”. Now the Middle east is crying out for some decent online statistics, in fact its crying out for any market data. Hell, they don’t even know who watches what on TV here!

So the idea that Nielsen, a well established renowned media research company where going to release figures about internet usage in the region was fantastic.  I was thinking age ranges, average usage time, most visited sites, online activities etc. A gold mine of information.

Well sadly i was shocked, disappointed, astounded and speechless by the end and here’s why.

This is a company which prides itself on its data and data analysis. So why did the presenter try to tell us that the break down figures for marketing spend across online, TV, magazine, etc. in Australia (even though we’re in MENA!) in 2007 had probably not changed much in comparison to today’s figures? Yet only a couple of slides earlier in the presentation they had said that online ad spending had gone up and as we all know marketing budgets by in large are frozen so therefore the % share for online must have changed.

Then there was the fact that this was billed as stats on the region, yet there where no stats about the region. The most we got told was that Maktool saw a drop in visitors in the region during june because people had left for the summer. A taxi driver could have told you that! Also, apparently usage dropped over the weekend, shock horror. And finally, usage increased on news that Michael Jackson had died, ground breaking!

Then as a sad indictment of their lack of knowledge of even their own product, when a member of the audience asked what the difference between Nielsen’s online tools and Google Ad Manager & Analytics, the presenters where unable to provide any compelling insight or differentiation. The reasons given where that Nielsen’s tag implementation was ’standardised’ across all websites and their results auditted by  a 3rd party. Now, given that Google tools are free and Nielsen’s cost quite a bit and if Nielsen what to try and persuade a region historically bad at research and tracking to invest in their tools they are going to have to come up with far better reasons then these. Hell, I can rattle off half a dozen reasons without having to think to much but that’s not my job and their presentation has certainly not indeered me to support or assist them.

One final sad twist in the tale is that I posted my thoughts about the presentation on their linkedIn discussion about the event and within 24hrs the discussion was no longer available.  Seeing as they are a company embracing social networking and marketing the importance of tracking online ‘buzz’ to enable companies to respond this just goes to show that someone in Nielsen (hopefully just this region) does not get it.

Come on Nielsen, pull your socks up and take the region seriously!

[Rant finished]

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Bootnote

I received a response from Tahir @ Nielsen which went some way to addressing the issues i raised but did not wholly satisfy me. I will ask him if i can use his response on this blog and post an update.