Nielsen is expanding Digital Ad Ratings audience measurement on YouTube’s mobile app to 26 additional global markets—including such key countries as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey—the company announced today.
The move helps deliver on a more global basis something marketers, such as Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard and recently departed Unilever Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Keith Weed, have been clamoring for—third-party measurement of digital media across platforms.
The expansion will give media buyers and sellers access to age and gender demographics, plus reach, frequency and gross-rating points (GRPs) on the YouTube mobile app across a total of 34 countries, including the U.S. While it covers YouTube, Digital Ad Ratings also allows for measuring audiences, including anonymized individuals, across outside publishers, helping marketers cap the frequency with which the same people see the same ads, said Amanda Tarpey, senior vice president of Digital Product Leadership at Nielsen. Essentially, Digital Ad Ratings provides TV-style GRPs that cover digital video and other digital formats.
DAR has Media Rating Council accreditation in the U.S., Tarpey said. And while that doesn’t extend to the broader global coverage, with many countries not having a similar independent organization to vet the accuracy of third-party measurement, MRC accreditation has become a sort of de facto standard in many places outside the U.S. as well.
“It gives advertisers a view of their base reach and frequency across all of the different websites and apps and publishers,” Tarpey says. “Instead of having to guess the extent to which the same people are seeing your ads on different sites, Digital Ad Ratings gives you a single, de-duplicated reach-frequency number.”
