Why Nielsen’s Adex reports are falling short in Malaysia

Nielsen’s Adex reports are widely used across the world, and in Malaysia, this is no different.They are used to assess competitor ad spend, as well as by agencies to assess the size of a pitch before going for new business, particularly where media agencies are concerned.But with the advent of digital, Nielsen’s offerings have increasingly come under fire by agencies – particularly for falling short in the digital and OOH measurement segments.“Nielsen was under tremendous pressure from our industry as it is not able to set up measurement of digital adex which is growing in importance in Malaysia,” said Wong Piyee, managing director of VivaKi Malaysia.Last year, it collaborated with Sizmek through logs and released the online display adex. While Sizmek purportedly measures up to 80% of Malaysia’s display advertising (as told to A+M by Nielsen) – it is restricted to two formats only: standard banner and rich media with or without video.“They cannot provide industry data by advertisers and categories, which makes it meaningless for us to strategise and benchmark our digital plan,” Wong pointed out.She added that for the agency’s current digital investment across clients as well as the consumer digital behaviour landscape, a majority of the digital dollars was missing. This is especially when it comes to Google and Facebook direct buys, mobile, programmatic buying, search, social, email, skippable video and more.As for the out-of-home mediums, Nielsen Outdoor only monitors five players – Big Tree Outdoor, Ganad Media, Kurnia Outdoor, Spectrum Outdoor and UPD Sdn Bhd – “which only comprises 1% of the overall adex”, Wong said.How far off the mark is it?Wong estimates that for digital, current reports only reflect up to 10% of the actual digital pie.For OOH: “Our internal estimation for OOH forecast is that it is about 5% of the overall adex, based on media owners in the market, versus the 1% actually reported by Nielsen.”Eileen Ooi, general manager of Maxus, was of a similar opinion.“We forecast that online media spend is at 13% to 15% of the market today, and in three years will most likely surpass total TV spends. With the rapid speed of change, most digital media would be biddable tomorrow and served across multiple platforms, yet today’s digital adex tracked only reflects approximately 55% of the market. This number will only decline if research methodologies and technologies do not lean into change quicker,” she said.However, digital still takes a small share of the pie, therefore, she believes the total media adex still reflects a good 70% to 80% view of the market, dependent on the category.Kristian Lee, business development director at Naga DDB, said: “Adex by Nielsen and others should not be used in isolation to measure the overall health of the industry.“Agencies have adapted to the challenge of catering their communications where audiences are most present and a large bulk of these campaigns as I mentioned are not captured by these reports.”Jordan Chua, managing director of JWT’s digital agency Mirum, also pointed out that digital spend was poorly measured, and said his team used it more to analyse which channels were used to reach a broad base of audiences.“It still gives an indication of the market potential for digital growth,” he said, but added that his team had to review other sources of research, data and consumer studies as well to assess and verify the indicators.He is also the vice-president of the Malaysian Digital Association (MDA). MDA is actively engaging and collaborating with Nielsen, comScore, key media agencies and publishers to determine all plausible methods to track ad spends. This includes display advertising, online videos, social media, paid search and mobile.How this affects the marketDespite complaints from agencies, many still rely on Nielsen’s ad spend reports to gauge the size of an account before pitching.“That’s for the quantitative bit, however, we also rely on some qualitative measures to also gauge the potential of the clients,” Ooi said.VivaKi’s Wong believes this lack of credible measurement affects the progress of Malaysia’s ad industry to truly embrace digital.“Without the credible Adex data, for our current digital and OOH planning, we are not able to benchmark to devise strategies such as scheduling and weight level setting. We are relying on digital behaviour reports and trends to push investment digital which hinders the speed of growth of digital investment because clients are not able to justify digital budgets and allocation without credible data support.”However, Ooi also added that agencies did have various sources of information, including proprietary tools to bridge the gap internally.“However, it (the gap) may impact the less mature clients whom today still rely on adex data to benchmark their communication strategies.”Nielsen’s responseBenjamin Ting, executive director for the media industry group at Nielsen Malaysia, said that Nielsen currently monitors advertising spend on television and print mediums in-house, while other mediums such as cinema, radio, and in-store are monitored through schedules supplied by media representatives and owners in Malaysia.As for Sizmek, it provides Nielsen with logs for all online display advertisement impressions that have been served monthly, since January 2014.He also admitted that with ongoing fragmentation and increasing competition within the digital advertising sector, Sizmek’s share of the market has declined over the past year which has served to reduce Nielsen’s coverage of online advertising.“As a result, we are currently under reporting digital ad spend. We have identified this issue and are now working closely with industry stakeholders to develop an alternative approach which meets the needs of the industry,” Ting said.Ooi added: “Personally I do not think the industry has it figured out yet. Even in the more mature markets like the US, there is no seamless tracking in place, and they work on multiple platforms and resources for adex. What’s definitely evident is more and more of the adex data will sit with media giants, e.g. Google and Facebook and technology platform owners in near future.”