• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 14, 2011

Nielsen Tuesday unveiled a push to turn the new online campaign ratings system it developed with Facebook into the online equivalent of the TV industry's so-called "GRPs," or gross ratings points, which are Madison Avenue's "currency" for the multibillion TV advertising marketplace. The plan, which was explained during a briefing with investors codenamed "Deep Dive," includes a major push to coopt major advertisers and agencies.

"We've hand-picked the most advanced advertisers and thinkers on the agency side," Steve Hasker, president of Nielsen's Watch Global Products division (formerly Media Research), told investors and Wall Street analysts during a conference call and Webcast Tuesday morning.

Hasker said Nielsen plans to work "on-site, hand-in-hand with those major clients" over the next six months to figure out the best way to make its so-called NOCR (Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings) the currency for online advertising buys. He said the goal was critical to the development of online brand advertising, because online search and "direct response" advertising online, brand advertising lacks the kind of proof-of-performance that has enabled television to grow into the world's dominant brand advertising medium.

The NCOR system, which has been in development for more than a year, utilizes Facebook's massive user base as its core sample, and Nielsen officially unveiled it and began pushing it aggressively during presentations and meetings at the Advertising Research Foundation's audience measurement conference in New York in June. Last week, Nielsen announced that it had received accreditation for the new ratings from the Media Rating Council, an important step toward becoming a genuine advertising currency.

Hasker said that NCOR had already run about 80 online ad campaigns, and that the system "didn't break." He noted that Nielsen is beginning by offering the ratings with the same kind of age and gender breaks that TV's GRPs utilize, but that the Nielsen already is looking at ways that can exploit Facebook's humongous user base to define new audience characteristics that might be more appealing to advertisers.

He cited "information on parents, income or education level" as examples of potential new audience breaks, and said the goal is to create "a new industry standard" for defining online audiences.

"It takes time," he told the investors. "It took us time to become the standard in TV. And it will take us time to become the standard here."

Hasker said that all the data derived from Facebook users would be "aggregated" and "privacy compliant," but he told the investors to "think about Facebook as an extension of Nielsen."

He also touted the reliability of Facebook's user base as a representative proxy for the online universe, noting that, "People tend not to lie about who they are on Facebook," because other users, including friends and family, will out them if they do.

He said that Nielsen already knows what the "error rate" is in those Facebook audience profiles based on proprietary research Nielsen Chief Research Officer Paul Donato has conducted, and he also said that Nielsen has filed for a patent to protect the NOCR methodology.

Hasker said Nielsen was beginning with online display and video advertising campaigns, but he said the company plans to eventually "scale" NOCR into social and mobile media. On a related noted, Hasker also disclosed that Nielsen had already perfected a way of incorporating ratings from people who watch TV shows via mobile smartphones and tablet computers into its new "extended panel" ratings, which currently include online viewing of TV shows by people in Nielsen's national TV audience sample.

Hasker said the big hold-up to incorporating mobile viewing of TV shows in its TV ratings sample was "the industry," alluding to the fact that Nielsen clients hadn't yet made up their minds about how to treat such viewing exposure.

"What we have done is extended C3 into the online environment, and we are well positioned to extend it into smartphones and tablets as well, as soon as the industry is comfortable with that. When the time comes, we will add mobile," he said.