Nielsen has re-organized its online and mobile services audience measurement services this week with the creation of Nielsen Online and Nielsen Mobile, which has been put together on the back of acquiring Telephia, a mobile research company it bought back in August.
Nielsen Online will be made up of the US NetRatings business that it developed and the BuzzMetrics services it acquired through the purchase of Israeli group Trendum two years ago. BuzzMetrics tracks the use of online consumer-generated media and was also merged with Inteliseek in January.
This merged business will now address the whole gamut of online audiences analysis, advertising, video, blogs, consumer-generated media, word-of-mouth internet effects, and commerce and consumer behavior. In effect this move looks to be about taking what was a heavily US oriented group and merging it with other interests of Nielsen’s VNU parent to make it an single international entity.
Nielsen Mobile will take the parts of Nielsen that were already chasing mobile markets and combine them with the recently acquired Telephia, which offers syndicated consumer research and uses technology based measurement tools as well as large-scale, consumer panels to help clients understand behavior, attitudes and mobile consumer experience.
Nielsen announced that Itzhak Fisher, former executive chairman of
BuzzMetrics, will lead Nielsen Online as executive chairman of the service, while Sid Gorham, the former CEO of Telephia and a 20 year veteran of the telecom industry, will be CEO of Nielsen Mobile.
More than 2,000 clients across 16 countries subscribe to Nielsen Online and another 125 telecom companies including major mobile operators, rely on Nielsen Mobile based data.
Nielsen Wireless, a recently announced initiative to measure wireless
media, will be folded into Nielsen Mobile while Nielsen RingScan, which measures downloaded ringtones, will remain part of the Nielsen Entertainment organization.
Faultline Comment
Nielsen has a tough time ahead of it in audience measurement, because its old approach of interviewing thousands of people can, in some markets, be replaced by purely technological means with some server somewhere recoding internet and mobile content accesses, which lowers the price of entry into the audience measurement field. It is key for it to create services which are global, and which can stretch across all forms of advertising at one time, which has the effect of raising the cost of competing with it across the board, and fits better with the way advertising is moving, to become independent of its delivery format ‘ TV, internet, handset, radio – and instead become a single all embracing market. Nielsen will also need to become the preferred clearing house of advertising information collected by rival entertainment companies.