Facebook ditched its Beacon program earlier this week, deciding instead to partner with Nielsen on a less-controversial vehicle to push advertising to its social-networking masses.
On Tuesday, Facebook announced a multi-year strategic alliance with Nielsen to help marketers make better use of the Internet to develop and market new products. The alliance leverages Facebook’s global consumer reach with Nielsen’s market-research savvy to offer marketers deeper consumer insights.
“Facebook is an increasingly vital link between consumers and brands,” said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen’s online division. “We will now be able to add deep knowledge of this important social network to our unmatched media measurement and consumer insight across all three screens. Together we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how Web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior.”
Need a Brand Lift?
Facebook and Nielsen lost no time in rolling out the first collaborative product, called Nielsen BrandLift. BrandLift will launch in the U.S. with select test partners this week and roll out to all Facebook advertisers in coming months.
BrandLift measures aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration via a set of short one- or two-question online surveys. Nielsen will work directly with Facebook’s advertising clients to conduct hundreds of BrandLift tests. Nielsen said the benefits of the program include accuracy, speed and ease of creation and implementation.
“Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad-effectiveness data,” said Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. “The combination of our unique ability to quickly and effectively poll a sample of our more than 300 million users and Nielsen’s expertise in data analysis will give marketers access to powerful data they can use to understand and improve current and future campaigns.”
Bolstering Credibility
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