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Nielsen to provide currency for planning digital ad campaigns

Nielsen has started out by providing the first online currency to plan advertising campaigns on the Internet in the UK. Nielsen India will follow suit

UKOM, the UK Online Measurement body, has appointed The Nielsen Company as its official partner to create an online currency for planning advertising campaigns on the Internet. With this move, Nielsen provides the online currency of choice to a total of 10 world markets.

In addition to the UK, Nielsen provides the currency of choice in France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, China and South Africa. Nielsen India will follow suit soon.

Nielsen to provide currency for planning digital ad campaigns
According to John Burbank, chief executive officer of Nielsen's online division, "Our selection, supported by media, advertisers and agency groups, demonstrates the marketplace's confidence and trust in the reliability, consistency and validity of our online media measurement. As with our strategic alliance in the US to develop products to measure ad effectiveness online with Facebook, we are committed to partnering with our clients to help them compete in the marketplace."

Set to launch in January 2010, the UKOM Audience Planning System (APS) will give advertisers and their agencies the ability to plan media schedules around a single, benchmark source of accurate and consistent online data, just as they currently do in the UK for television, radio and print media.

In an official communiqué, Karthik Nagarajan, associate director, online division, The Nielsen Company, remarks, "This comes at a time when we are about to launch a similar online audience measurement service in India, which will help media planners and agencies to finally get access to the same extensive and accurate data that has helped grow ad spends in the largest online markets of the world."

Providing the online reach and frequency metrics that agency planners require to build media schedules, the planning system will supply UK online audience data for sites with around 50,000 unique visitors a month, among other services.

The planning currency will help display advertising grow much faster, by giving advertisers the confidence to commit more budgets to the digital form of advertising.

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