John Burbank, Nielsen Online
John Burbank
CEO
Nielsen Online
John Burbank leads The Nielsen Co.’s Nielsen Online, the provider of online audience measurement and analysis services for advertising, video, consumer-generated media, word-of-mouth, commerce and consumer behavior.
He served as chief marketing officer at The Nielsen Co. and at AOL. He has also worked at AT&T and Procter & Gamble.
Here, he tells eMarketer about the problems with existing measurement methods and outlines what needs to be fixed in order for marketers to spend more brand dollars online.
eMarketer: What is wrong with online brand measurement today and what is the solution?
John Burbank: The metrics today are all sort of geared around direct response and we have to find metrics that are much more suitable for brand advertising.
There are three things that have to happen. Publishers have to change the advertising units to enable advertisers to have a better brand presentation on their pages. Ultimately, low-interest or low-involvement brands need a chance to tell a story. Nobody cares about bathroom cleanser or toilet paper.
Online creative needs to create an emotional bond with consumers. There’s something very magical about television—that people recall an ad slogan, characters and a message like Mr. Whipple delivered for 20 years: “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.” The brand hasn’t advertised on TV for 25 years, and yet many consumers will recall the character and the tagline. It’s incredibly powerful. Contrast that with what you see on the Internet today and there’s nothing like it.
Why is that? You’d think that online ads deliver sight, sound and motion. Why is it that the Internet is not delivering the same kind of impact as TV? I think it has to do with the fact that the IAB standards on the units of advertising on the Web are small, they come very fast and they don’t persist very long. That’s the way they’ve been designed.
eMarketer: Wait a minute. What’s wrong with that? There are justifiable concerns about intrusiveness.
Mr. Burbank: The metrics are all wrong—when you’re an advertiser today, you buy a certain number of impressions and you get back a report that tells you how many people click on them. Very few people will ever click on an ad for toilet paper. It doesn’t matter how good it is. But didn’t it deliver something of value?
The trouble is that value is not being measured today. So what happens is the advertiser gets back—even if it’s good creative—a false negative that says 99.9% of the people didn’t click on the ad. It’s a tiny click-through rate. You need new metrics.
eMarketer: So it is not just that the ad formats are limiting. The Online Publishers Association has introduced larger units for its member publishers. We will begin to see those.
Mr. Burbank: Right. There also needs to be a change in the way agencies are structured. Media buying and planning has to be cross-platform and creative has to be done cross-platform. And nobody’s reporting GRPs—offline and online. It’s possible to do it but there’s no tool to do it on a consolidated basis.
eMarketer: What is the solution then? What does Nielsen Online propose?
Mr. Burbank: We’re in the metrics business. We believe that there are four very simple questions an advertiser wants to have answered.
One, instead of impressions and click-throughs, they want to know, who saw my ad? Two, how long did my ad stay in front of the consumer—if it’s a video ad, was the sound on or off, did it collapse the window in the preroll? Three, did I have a fair chance to get my message out? And four, among the people exposed, did my message change the way people see my brand, increase purchase intent and did the people exposed buy more stuff?
We have solutions to all of these and we’re in the market testing them with clients. We’re now starting to use them for clients but it hasn’t become standard yet. Advertisers have to say, “I don’t care how many impressions I buy, I need to reach 10 million women age 18 to 24.”
eMarketer: Do you advocate creating an industry standard for brand measurement?
Mr. Burbank: I think the industry would be well-served by having standards. There are all different kinds of standards. There are certainly standards for ad units, for banner sizes. There are some standards in terms of the impressions that are measured today by DoubleClick, Atlas and from various ad servers. But we don’t have standards around the actual audience reached.
I think if you were to look at industries around the world in the online space, there are more countries that have adopted a single provider of audience metrics.
The ideal thing is that everyone would answer those questions and they would use Nielsen to answer them. But our business model doesn’t depend on anybody anointing us as a standard.
eMarketer: Do the points you mentioned before apply to online video?
Mr. Burbank: Yes, they’re applicable to online video. For example, if you have a preroll ad for feminine protection, and the report you get back from the provider is that 50% of the audience skipped or turned off the video—what if you knew that the 50% [who] didn’t watch it were men?
Overall, what we hope to do is to be able to craft not just metrics that are mechanical, but audience-based metrics. For example, how did women respond differently to online advertising than men? How did older consumers respond different than younger ones?
We need much more audience-based purchase behavior that’s based on real people and behaviors and not on inferred behavior. I want to know real people, the real demographics. Their real offline purchase behavior.
