Nielsen News & Articles

Online advertising seems tailor-made for direct response marketing, given its measurability and ability to land an immediate sale. But now online channels are growing up in their capability to deliver media content and audiences, and the majority of online marketers in 2013 are fairly evenly splitting their digital spending between brand and direct response advertising -- even though there’s still a lack of consistency in effectively measuring ROI across platforms. That picture of the evolution of online advertising emerges from a new survey report by Vizu, a Nielsen company. 

Which type of media channel -- TV, newspapers, radio, Web -- is most effective in getting ad messages noticed and responded to? A new Nielsen study, underwritten by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), says that newspapers -- both print and online versions -- come out on top. 

Android was the dominant smartphone operating system in the US during Q3 2012 according to data from Nielsen, commanding 52 percent of the market. This put Android substantially ahead of any other smartphone OS, including Apple, which held 35 percent of the market.

Over the past few years, social media has quickly grown from a social pastime to an essential part of building a successful business.

Curious about who’s responding to your mobile ads the most? New research from RadiumOne suggests that it’s those within the 18-34 age range. Dubbed Generation C by Nielsen because of their connectivity to each other and content through multiple devices, this age group is one of the most coveted groups, but have proved hard to capture. Could mobile be the key to getting their attention?

If you think you’re seeing more ads online, it could be because online ad spending is booming. According to a new report from consumer researcher Nielsen, Net advertising saw the biggest increase among all ad spending worldwide in the first quarter, with a 12.1 percent increase compared to a year ago at the same time.

Consumer research firm Nielsen is attempting to bolster its reporting capabilities in the online advertising sector with the purchase of Vizu, a technology company that enables advertisers and publishers to assess and optimize online advertising effectiveness. Nielsen says the acquisition will build on its existing online and cross-platform advertising campaign measurement solutions.

When I say television, you say social media! Television! Social Media! It may seem odd, but according to NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, television viewers are leveraging social media as a platform to talk about and engage with TV content.

Soon you will be able to measure online display advertising using Facebook data and TV-style reporting. Nielsen, who knows a thing or two about ratings, is getting ready to release Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, which is just finishing up a six-month trial.

According to Jakob Nielsen, iPad user interfaces have improved in the past year. Yet, there is still room for further advancement.

The Web, according to Jon Udell, is constructed of a number of small, easy to understand building blocks. Yet while billions of people make use of the Web every day, few really understand its fundamental concepts. This leads to a poor use of the Internet and greatly reduces the reach and effectiveness of the information produced.

According to Udell, by creating products and information services in accordance with the key concepts, we can make the Web a better place -- one that is is more useful to humanity as a whole.

Udell's seven key Web concepts:

1. Authority
2. Indirection
3. Structure
4. Naming
5. Scope
6. Publish / Subscribe
7. Services

This morning at the J. Boye 2011 conference in Philadelphia Jon expanded on each of these ideas. In the following video is he spends 44 minutes digging through the details and illustrating them via a pet project called Elm City.

You may want to skip around if you're viewing this at work. We also apologize for the dim video lighting -- we were shooting in a low light environment with a bright background. Not ideal.

Here is a section index for the video: Topic Introduction (00:00-07:18), Elm City Example Project Intro (07:18-10:18), Authority Concept Discussion (10:19-14:39), Indirection Concept Discussion (14:40-19:28), Structure Concept Discussion (19:29-26:10), Naming Concept Discussion (26:11-34:34), Scope Concept Discussion (34:35-38:38), Publish/Subscribe Concept Discussion (38:39-41:10), Services Concept Discussion + Wrap-up (41:11-End).

What I enjoyed most about Jon's talk was the discussion of tags as information services. I think this is an extremely powerful idea and one that is probably under appreciated. We tend to rely on Google or some form of an index to locate information we want. But tags used well have almost the same mind-boggling power as a major search engine, without requiring anything like the same brain or CPU power. Jon illustrated this with a Yahoo! Pipes example and discussed the concepts more generally in the "Naming" part of the video (minutes 26:11-34:34).

In the US markets, Android has fast overtaken other smartphone operating systems in terms of market share. Symbian still leads the game in the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan), but analysts expect the platform to cede the top spot to Android within the year.

Web publishing roll-up tackles the crazy ups and downs of online advertising and the misunderstood nature of innovative technologies.

If we can trust Jakob Nielsen and his latest report studying social networking on intranets, then next year is going to be interesting.

Nielsen went straight to various companies -- from Sprint to IBM to Johnson & Johnson -- to see how they are dealing with the increasing expectation that Web 2.0 will drive Enterprise 2.0. The quick answer, they’re not.

Jakob Nielsen says that "websites are definitely easier to use now than they used to be." That's because in his recent survey of 24 websites, which analyzed users' task outcomes and compared it to data collected from the same sites five years earlier, results showed that web usability has improved.