In the old days of advertising, the popular saying used to be that only 50 per cent of advertising worked - but one didn't know which 50 per cent!

In today's world of digital media, marketers hope to eliminate this bit of guesswork and get the full value for every advertising dollar spent. Nitin Mathur, Senior Director (Marketing), Yahoo! India, says that with smart targeting techniques and putting a bit of science to it, there's no reason why on the Internet you cannot make your advertising dollar stretch the full distance, with returns of 100 per cent. “We did a campaign for Procter & Gamble's Pampers targeting mothers in the SEC A category and I think it went home,” he says.

But to get the full measure of their target audience, advertisers want data and there is a frenzy to get the numbers. As Nestle's global head of digital marketing and social meda, Pete Blackshaw, says, “You have to get the digital measurements, get the conversations analysis, search analysis and the behaviour pattern.”

With such a clamour for data, it's not surprising that measurement companies such as comScore, Nielsen and many more of their ilk are in great demand, and this has occasionally led to a war of numbers.

In 1999, when British-Italian Gian Fulgoni, along with his Lebanese colleague Dr Magid Abraham, jumped headlong into the world of digital measurement (they used to run market research firm Information Resources), little did they know where their start-up comScore would take them. “We started comScore to study e-commerce and online buying behaviour – we didn't anticipate the rate at which Internet would grow,” grins Fulgoni.

Today comScore, which went on to acquire companies such as Media Metrix in 2002, has posted over $200 million in revenue, and is on a rapid global expansion course (170-plus countries are under measurement though it reports only on 43). It tracks two million people's digital lives around the globe - what they buy, what they watch, what they do. It entered India two years ago.

Fulgoni says that just when they feel they have got a measure of online behaviour, along comes a new phenomenon, creating a whole new pattern to be decoded.

“The questions are getting complicated, and they are presenting a great challenge as well as opportunity to firms like us,” says Fulgoni.

Currently, he says, the frenzy out there among marketers is to get to the bottom of the social media mystery. Farshad Family, Managing Director, Nielsen Media India, corroborates this, describing how advertisers really want to unravel what's happening on social media.

Go figure, Social!

Both comScore's as well as Nielsen's research show why there is so much angst among advertisers and marketers to understand social networks. Social networking has already eaten into a lot of activities occurring online.

Nearly one in five minutes spent online is on social networks, says comScore. Today nearly four in five active Internet users visit social networks and blogs, says Nielsen.

But marketers want more than numbers, they want a pattern. Nielsen's Farshad Family says, “It's a rallying cry that you need to go beyond the number of likes on Facebook and number of Twitter followers.” Which is why he explains, Nielsen began looking at company-owned fan pages very closely, analysing buzz levels, how many posts are generated on the page, how many comments, how many conversations, as well as the sentiments expressed towards the brand. And this is how it arrived at a social media brand equity index. (See chart).

No surprises, the telcos and auto companies dominate the top 20 list social media for India – and the only FMCG brand was Maggi from Nestle.

The telcos and autos were easy to explain, but Maggi was an interesting presence – so Nielsen dug deeper and found that people had an emotional bond and exchanged recipes.

“What we give out are not data but actionable recommendations to advertisers. Just giving numbers is not interesting,” says Family. NM Incite listens in on conversations of one billion consumers on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums, in 25 countries.

comScore also says it says the excitement lies in going behind the numbers and providing advice. “Go beyond your Fan pages,” Fulgoni advises advertisers, showing with live examples.

For instance, Oreo's fan following on Facebook is nearly 17.5 million. But the unique visitors to the fan page are only around 137,000. “Just because people like a brand doesn't necessarily mean they go to it – in fact, research shows that very few people actually go back to the fan page,” he says, explaining why putting a display ad on the fan page just based on the number of fans may not get guaranteed returns.

Incidentally, he says, 28 per cent of all online display advertisements go to Facebook in the US (most of these are on fan pages) But advertisers need to look at the number of unique visitors and then think of strategies beyond. Tap the friends of fans, suggests Fulgoni, showing a bit of research which suggests that the likelihood of friends of fans visiting a brand's Web site is higher. Despite so much of social media under measurement, the companies keeping score say there's still a lot that's not known.

“A company might have four million Facebook fans, but there's still a lot of things new about them that needs to be figured out – such as how can you engage them offline,” says Family.

Mobile and More

The other areas where the measurement companies are facing a lot of demand, they say, is on mobile behaviour as well as multimedia measurement (measuring across more than two screens). Nielsen's mobile insights in India, for instance, with a panel size of 5,000 under measurement, is focused on how smartphone users are using their cell phones.

“How it works is we download an app on the smart phone under test and it captures everything you do. How many calls you make, how much time are you spending there, which apps, which videos are you watching,” says Family.

comScore's Fulgoni talks about initiating a three-screen measurement. Measuring a person's behaviour on the television screens, on mobile phone and on PCs, and comparing the differences, which promises to be an exciting new area.

And coming back to the original question of getting more bang for the advertising buck, Family describes how the third thrust for Nielsen Media in India is going to be OCR – online campaign readings – which is still in test stage.

“It gives you reach and frequency by demographics for a campaign,” he says. “We tag any creative asset that an advertiser would run, be it video or a banner ad, or any format on Yahoo!, MSN. Every time a click shows up, we are counting in the back. We also ping our publishing partners and get details on demographics and so on,” says Family, describing how one of the lead partners for Nielsen in this is Facebook.

Well, there's no end to the numbers game, it seems.

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