MUMBAI: Nielsen has been appointed by UKOM, the UK online measurement body, as its official partner to create the country‘s first currency for planning advertising campaigns on the internet.

In India, Nielsen will follow suit and launch a similar standard for internet measurement.

In addition to the UK, Nielsen provides the currency of choice in France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, China and South Africa. In early September, Nielsen also acquired KoreanClick, a web measurement company in South Korea.

Nielsen‘s online division CEO John Burbank says, "As with our strategic alliance in the US to develop products to measure ad effectiveness online with Facebook, we are committed to partnering with our clients to help them compete in the marketplace." Set to launch in January 2010, the UKOM Audience Planning System (APS), powered by Nielsen, gives advertisers and their agencies the ability to plan media schedules around a single, benchmark source of highly accurate and consistent online data, just as they currently do in the UK for TV, radio and print media.

Nielsen associate director, online division Karthik Nagarajan says, "This comes at a time when we are about to launch a similar online audience measurement service in India, which will help media planners and agencies to finally get access to the same extensive and accurate data that has helped grow ad spends in the largest online markets of the world. It will be the first currency for planning advertising campaigns on the Internet in the country".

Providing the online reach and frequency metrics that agency planners require to build media schedules, the planning system will supply UK online audience data for sites with at least 50,000 unique visitors a month, and more.

In 2008, according to the IAB, the UK display ad market was worth $1.02 billion - 90 per cent more than in 2005. However, display‘s growth has lagged behind the other two major forms of online advertising - search (up 159 per cent) and classifieds (up 173 per cent). The planning currency will help display advertising grow much faster by giving advertisers the confidence to commit more budgets to this form of advertising.