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“Accountability.” “Measurable return on investment.” “Dollar value.”

Welcome to the Middle East marketing scene, an environment that has a sudden obsession with measurement.

One of the many consequences of a recession for individuals and companies alike is the sudden extra attention paid to incomes and expenditures, and the marketing industry here is no different. In fact, following several years of unchecked excess, it could be said that the region’s industry has turned towards accountability harder and faster than most.

The big winner from this scenario, it is assumed, will be digital and new media. A growing sector irrespective of economic distress, these new technologies lend themselves to auditing and measurement in a way that traditional media can only dream of; it’s fast, cheap, accurate and detailed.

If you know what you’re doing, that is. For many marketers the online and digital media worlds can seem veiled in darkness; consequently there is a massive opportunity for companies that can shine a light into that gloom. That’s what online audience measurement companies do.

These companies track the number of visitors to a Web site, amass demographic details of those visitors, record when they visit, the frequency of visits, which pages they view, and how long they spend on each page. Then they convert it into accessible, organized representations – “dashboards,” tables and charts – to give practical insights into a Web site’s readership. To the brand or company running the site this data can be invaluable – by owning such robust data for its Web presence it not only has a better understanding of how consumers engage with it online, but also increased credibility and clout with advertisers and marketers. And for marketers this data is the foundation upon which a campaign can be devised, and later evaluated.

Effective Measure is one the companies that provide these measurement services. It entered the region recently via a team-up with Real Opinions, a Dubai-based market research company. With offices in six major cities around the world, Effective Measure is no fly by night operation. But compared to the company it identifies as its primary competition, Effective Measure has some way to go.

EFFECTIVE ARRIVAL. With headquarters in Australia, Effective Measure now has offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, London, New York and Dubai. The company achieved its regional presence via a tie-up with Dubai-based market research consultancy Real Opinions.

“Effective Measure is a digital audience measurement tool that enables advertisers, media planners and publishers to better understand the size and demographic make up of regional website audiences,” says Scott Julian, Effective Measure’s CEO. “The technology allows these groups to define and measure total audience numbers accurately and without duplication over any specified time period.”

Effective Measure basically works on two fronts. First it monitors general Web usage data, tracking and aggregating data across multiple sites, browsers and devices. Secondly it recruits Web users to be part of its “segmentation” panels. People can visit a range of sites at which they receive an invite to opt-in. These “opt-ins” create a panel of users who respond to surveys, providing demographic information that can be shared across the market. Thus the company can report on both general Web usage, and segmentation usage, using information collected in real time. Effective Measure claims to have over 65,000 active “opt-ins” in its Middle East panel.

Julian says the regional response to the system has been very strong, and in a short period of time it has come to be “considered a leader within the local market.” Twenty publishers and a further 80 Web sites took part in initial trials, and many are now in contract negotiations. Effective measure says it will shortly announce confirmed contracts with market-leading names.

INTELLIGENT COMPETITION. Effective Measure is not the first online metric company on the Middle Eastern block, however. “Nielsen is the world’s leading marketing and media information company,” says the company’s Website. This is the company that Julian believes Effective Measure is here to challenge.
Headquartered in New York, Nielsen is a privately held company with a presence in more than 100 countries around the world. It has been operating in the Middle East for more than 25 years, and established its online business regionally in Dubai Media City in 2008.

The global online division was created in the mid ’90s and is now operational in many major markets across the world. According to Tahir Khalil, associate director at Nielsen, it was “the first company in the world to develop crucial concepts like the Internet Panel measurement and Tag based measurement.”

The Nielsen online system centers around Market Intelligence, a product that produces a syndicated view of the audience for websites, providing the “essential metrics for Media planning,” says Khalil.

Together with Nielsen’s website measurement service Site Census and online ad tracking service Campaign Analysis, Market Intelligence makes up the Nielsen Online Web Analytics suite.

Like Effective Measure, Nielsen combines census-based and panel-based methodology, utilizing its own technology. As the company’s Web site explains, “By leveraging a range of Web technologies that include tagging, probing and ad collection, we can gather and analyze large volumes of data.” More specific demographic data from the panels is gathered using a combination of Random Digital Dial (RDD) panel and online-recruited panels. The RDD provides a baseline against which the online-recruited data can be weighted.

Nielsen is well established, with a client list that includes such major players as the Maktoob group, Vodafone’s Sarmady, Orange telecommunications, and publisher ITP. And Khalil says over 30 other Web sites are in trial with the system across the region.

COOKIE COLLECTIVE. The key question is: What separates two services like this? The main answer, according to Julian, is cookies, or more precisely, cookie deletion.

“Effective Measure produces its audience measurement data via the use of patent-pending DigitalHelix technology,” he says. “Digital Helix is designed to cope with the deletion of cookies and thus provide the most accurate counts of the number of visitors to a site. Other methods based solely on cookies suffer from a couple of problems, the most serious one being that they generate inaccurate data regarding site traffic when users delete cookies.”

The theory being that, while the number of page views is accurate with other systems (such as Nielsen), their figures for total number of visitors can be over-counted, since Web users who have deleted cookies will be counted again when they return to a site. Over time, this could skew figures.

However, this difference, and more specifically the mechanics by which it is achieved, has stirred up some very apparent animosity between Nielsen and the Real Opinions and Effective Measure partnership. At the time of the official launch of Nielsen’s SiteCensus services earlier this year, Nielsen aired concerns that Effective Measure’s Digital Helix system used flash-based cookies, which could breach the law. These cookies are placed outside of the users temporary Internet folder, and hence could violate the US and UK regulations to which the UAE market adheres.

These suspicions were reported in an article in Business 24-7 in June. In the article a Real Opinions spokesmen confirmed the use of flash cookies, but insisted the company was abiding by guidelines. Subsequently the company has met with the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority to assess the regional policy. The result has put Real Opinions in the clear “provided that the site owners we measure do not breach the content guidelines the TRA has in place,” said Julian in a follow up article.

Having established the legal ground upon which they are standing, Effective Measure and Real Opinions say they are concentrating on tailoring their offering for the regional market.

“One of the key things that sets Effective Measure apart from its competitors is the understanding we have that each region has particular requirements and sensitivities,” says Julian. “As part of a robust and ongoing consultation process with local publishers we have tailored Effective Measure to be the most effective, useful and adaptable solution for the region.”

Nielsen, meanwhile, contends that its system is superior for the exact opposite reasons. Its online measurement tool is the same across the world and well established in many markets. This does two things; guarantees that the region is using a widely accepted and highly credible system, and makes sure that MENA participants benefit from the large-scale investment that goes into a product answering to customers all over the globe.

Both companies were reluctant to discuss the prices for their services with Communicate, on the grounds that prices varied according to the demands of each site.
 

COMPETING COUNTS. Effective Measure seems to be spoiling for a fight, relishing the challenge of taking on the big boy Nielsen in a new market. Julian says for too long there has been “a lack of competition” in the audience measurement sphere. This, he argues, has led to a lack of innovation on behalf of the incumbent players.

More established Nielsen, on the other hand, seems to have its eyes on the bigger picture. “Nielsen has competition in many markets, it’s a natural fact of life,” says Khalil. “And in all the markets where this happens, our position is clear, the important thing here is about producing standards that the Industry can use, that are well understood, and that generate transparency and trust.”

In other words, Nielsen wants to become the standard bearer for the entire audience measurement industry.

“It’s not so much about the competition as it is about the metrics,” says Khalil. “By using our tools, the MENA advertising planners will be able to target their campaigns in ways that they could never do before. This will maximize the return on investment for the advertisers which will in turn drive more ad spend to the online industry. And this is the tip of the iceberg. Nielsen is very serious about online media, we are planning to enlarge our portfolio in the MENA region over the next two years with more global standards for the measurement of online media.”

LIFE BEYOND THE WEB. In the clamor for online measurement there seems to be a danger, however, that we will get carried away with this new marketing tool. The industry agrees it is important – increasingly so in the economic circumstances – to spend marketing budgets in a quantifiable way. And for new media and online it plays an especially valuable role in persuading wary and often inexperienced marketers of what their investment is buying.

But amidst this enthusiasm for stats and figures marketers should not lose sight of the fact that there is always a bigger picture to consider. Outside of Web and online traffic, there are other key areas where the numbers are equally important; for instance financial and purchasing metrics; who is buying your product, how, where and in what volumes and frequency?

Not to mention information beyond numerical data, namely wider brand recognition and reputation. What do people think of the brand, why and how do they behave toward it? Part of this information can be gleaned from Internet penetration and usage, but while the Internet is a growing sphere it still reaches only a minority of the population, even in developed markets. Traditional media is not dead yet, and covers a much larger audience; in a developing region like the Middle East it has fuel in the tank yet.

In order to reach and understand the whole market it is necessary to look at offline and qualitative measurements too. Marketers would do well to remember that, and plan a wider measurement strategy. Online metrics are not the answer; they are just part of the equation.

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