Nielsen : Subverting a convention

A targeted banner is wide of the mark.

The Site

Nielsen, the international consumer research company, uses a journey-finder format as the basis of a generic promotion.

Nielsen’s home page is a location portal inviting visitors to select a country option. Those choosing United States are taken to the country home page where an animated ‘I am:…’ banner sequentially highlights the options ‘a brand manager’, ‘a network exec’ and ‘a market researcher’. None is linked, but clicking anywhere on the banner leads to a page about tailored services which carries only two lines of promotional text: “Need to compete better? Nielsen expertise solutions may just provide the complete understanding of the consumer you have been looking for”.

In the top of the right-hand column is a Related Solutions link: ‘You may be interested in: Consumer Packaged Goods Practice’. Clicking this opens a redirection page saying the site no longer exists and enquirers should wait to be sent to the Nielsen.com site. This then opens on the global portal page.

The Takeaway

It appears that Nielsen is so absorbed in monitoring consumers’ use of the internet and other media that its US operation has no time for upkeeping its own site and managing customer expectations on it. The problem goes deeper than the misdirection of a target group (the consumer packaged goods people) to a global portal from where all they can do is re-enter the same closed circuit. Frustrating for them but not the only way the site is set up to generate interest then do its level best to stop converting it into leads.

It’s probable that the ‘I am’ feature is simply meant as an ad to show the types of people most likely to benefit from Nielsen’s “expertise solutions”. However, the way it is constructed at the front end mimics but does not mirror a journey-finder convention: user-type menus are common enough on home pages that visitors would expect to be able to click on the highlighted options and be taken to relevant information. Instead they are led to a generic landing page that compounds their frustration by its lack of meaningful information.

First published on 30 April, 2009