Nielsen chooses Thailand as first in Asia for digital ratings

United States-based media research company Nielsen said last week that it has chosen Thailand as the first market in Asia where it will launch its new system of measuring digital TV ratings across multiple platforms, while an industry group forecast that online advertising spending would rise by 20 percent this year in Thailand.

The new platform measures social media content across platforms such as audio, video, text, photos as well as television. Nielsen executives said Thailand would be the third market in the world, following the United States and Australia, where the company has rolled out the new system.

Last year, Nielsen began working with Facebook to improve its ability to accurately measure online advertising campaigns. The partnership benefited Facebook in enhancing the development of its own data assessment, and paved the way for Nielsen to measure Facebook’s digital content ratings across platforms.

Craig Johnson, an executive overseeing Nielsen East Asia and the Pacific, said the company’s digital content ratings would be introduced this year to help “total audience ratings come to life.” Speaking at a Nielsen seminar in Bangkok on total audience measurement, he said the move is the logical follow up to the launch last year of Nielsen’s digital advertising ratings measurement via smartphones.

Nielsen (Thailand) has been pouring investment into a series of measurement tools to capture the growing opportunities driven by digital media. Thais are virtual digital media addicts. In research released in 2015 by the Digital Advertising Association of Thailand, the Kingdom has 44.6 million mobile Internet users out of a population of 67.9 million people. More than 20 million Thai Facebook users log in to their accounts every day, out of a total of 37 million account holders, 94 percent of whom access Facebook through mobile devices.

To help consumer brands and advertisers improve the efficiency of advertising campaigns via digital media, Nielsen last year launched the ratings measurement for digital advertising on smartphones and personal computers. Nielsen also plans to extend that to other connected devices such as tablets and wearable devices.

Meanwhile, the Thai Webmasters Association said that it expects spending on online advertising will rise by 20 percent in 2016 compared to last year. However, foreign-owned websites will scoop up most of that advertising, and so Thai website owners will need to develop more innovative platforms with more extensive links across media to attract more users and advertising.

Thais own more than 100,000 websites, but only four or five attract more than 1 million visitors every day, said Apisilp Trunganont, the Association president and chief of technology at the popular web board Pantip.com.