Facebook and Nielsen launch BrandLift tool in UK

The launch is the latest component of Nielsen’s portfolio of advertising effectiveness solutions and marks the first product available outside the US from Facebook’s and Nielsen’s global, multi-year strategic alliance.

The alliance, formed in September 2009, is designed to help marketers better understand the value of the Internet in the overall marketing mix.

Nielsen BrandLift uses opt-in polls on Facebook to measure the impact of advertising on consumer attitudes including brand perception, ad recall and purchase intent – metrics that are important to how advertisers measure the effectiveness of their brand campaigns. So far, more than 70 studies have been conducted in the US across the FMCG, retail, media & entertainment, technology, telecom, financial and automotive sectors.

Stephen Haines, UK commercial director at Facebook, says, “Helping marketers measure the effectiveness of advertising using Facebook has been a priority for us and working with Nielsen helps us continue doing just that. Marketers have responded positively to BrandLift studies in the US and we know marketers in the UK will also benefit from a better understanding of how people react to their online campaigns.”

Louise Ainsworth, EMEA Managing Director, The Nielsen Company, Online, adds: “The power and scale of Facebook’s community provides a unique platform for research and this offering complements the portfolio of tools available to marketers in the UK with simple and fast insights on brand advertising.”

“Facebook and Nielsen are committed to changing how people think about online advertising, particularly looking beyond direct response to the effectiveness of the Internet for brand-oriented campaigns. To do this we intend to quickly build up a body of work here in the UK to provide local benchmarks to supplement those already available from studies done in the US.”

Earlier studies have revealed swift changes in brand ‘lift’ metrics such as awareness, especially for products and brands that are new or less well known. Not every advertising campaign resulted in a change in consumer attitudes; however 97 percent of studies saw statistically significant lift on at least one key brand lift metric while 85 percent of studies saw increases across at least two key metrics.

Nielsen BrandLift works with Nielsen being responsible for design and execution of the studies and working directly with Facebook’s clients; while Facebook is responsible for collecting the data.  To maintain privacy all data is aggregated before sending to Nielsen and neither company shares people’s personal information with marketers.

Nielsen data shows that Facebook had a 10.2% share of display-ad views in the UK in 2009, up from 6.4% in 2008. At the start of 2010, almost 60% of Britons active online visited the site, which accounted for just over 17% of all UK time on the Internet.