Nielsen has expanded its Canadian digital ad ratings service to include mobile devices, a long-expected move that has many agencies and tech vendors breathing a sigh of relief.
Although Nielsen’s digital ad ratings product (formerly known as Online Campaign Ratings, now informally called DAR by the industry) has included mobile in the U.S. since last summer, there have been significant barriers to building an accurate picture of mobile viewership outside the U.S., which have delayed DAR’s cross-platform upgrade in Canada and other markets.
In the interim, the consumer shift to mobile has continued, and demand from Canadian advertisers for cross-platform measurement has grown. Now that Nielsen is launching cross-platform in Canada — the first non-U.S. market where it will do so — a large number of agencies and tech vendors have signed up as launch partners, including AcuityAds, AOL Canada, BrightRoll, GroupM, TubeMogul, Turn, UM Canada and Videology.
“This is huge. Nielsen DAR is the first window into total audience measurement in Canada,” said Grant Le Riche, Canadian president of TubeMogul, in an email.
“Instead of manually compiling multiple reports from different partners, advertisers need a single place that lets them quickly glance at their entire campaign and empowers them to immediately take action based on those insights,” he said. “And as traditional channels like TV, radio, and OOH become automated, the need for cross-device ad planning, buying, and measuring will become even more critical.”
In the U.S., where TubeMogul beta-tested Nielsen’s cross-platform version of DAR, it was able to compare audiences reached on mobile and desktop, and found surprisingly little overlap in viewership between them. Le Riche said the findings show that mobile can be an effective way to reach viewers that advertisers can’t get to through other channels, and provide further evidence of the strategic value of mobile and cross-device advertising.
As global consumers shift more of their online consumption to mobile, pressure has been building on Nielsen and its chief competitor, ComScore, to complete the loop and provide a single, cross-device view of global audiences. Although both Nielsen’s DAR and ComScore’s competing ad campaign measurement product, Validated Campaign Essentials, have cross-platform capabilities in the U.S., Nielsen is the first to provide cross-platform ad ratings in Canada.
ComScore rolled out the multi-platform version of its media measurement product in Canada in November, and is expected to release the cross-platform version of vCE here sometime this year.
