GfK looks to gauge sales impact of ad campaigns with new panel

The Media Efficiency Panel (MEP) builds on a similar service which was rolled out in Germany last year by GfK and technology firm Nurago. The two companies are again working together in the UK, with TNS also contributing to the MEP.

Ten thousand households are participating in the panel, having been recruited via the TNS Worldpanel service. Each home scans its retail purchases, while Nurago’s web technology records the websites they visit and the online advertising they are exposed to. A separate survey is used to measure TV, radio and print consumption.

GfK NOP Media will be responsible for pulling all the data together. Research director Gary Roddy (pictured) said: “For the first time, the UK marketing industry will have real empirical data linking internet advertising directly to sales and the ability to compare this with other above-the-line advertising.”

Efforts had previously been made to achieve something similar by integrating Worldpanel data with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s Touchpoints survey. At the time, TNS was responsible for running the Touchpoints survey, but it has since lost the contract to Ipsos.

MEP has secured big-name backing from Google, which has committed to funding a number of pilot studies for FMCG firms and their ad agencies.

“We believe this is an important development in the measurement of media effectiveness,” said Shuvo Saha, head of Google’s FMCG business. “We are keen to learn with our advertiser and agency partners about the real effects of internet advertising in the context of the full media mix.”