Gemius has won a tender for online measurement study in Turkey. Let’s start with the Turkish online market itself. What does it look like in comparison to the Polish market?

Due to the considerable national demand, Turkey is an interesting market for any company thinking of developing the global reach of their business. Turkey is currently one of the largest markets to which Gemius exports their technological and know-how solutions. On the one hand, it is very similar to the Polish market, particularly in terms of the current trends in the digital economy – investments in digital advertising rose by 20 per cent in Turkey in the first half of 2016. This is evidence that Turkey is following in the footsteps of many other countries, and digital advertising is becoming the fastest growing media channel. Online advertising on mobile platforms, which accounts for 15 per cent of the total expenditure on digital advertising, has had a huge impact on the dynamics of this growth, as has programmatic technology, while the share of video advertising has remained at a stable level of 10 per cent. On the other hand, we should bear in mind that conducting business in Turkey means working in an environment that is in constant turmoil as a result of the unstable political situation. In these cases, the advertising sector is usually the first victim, inasmuch as the biggest advertisers often choose to limit their pre-planned spending.

One important element of the research is the measure of mobile apps and audio and video materials online, which are playing an increasingly large role. Can you elaborate on how Gemius analyses video materials?

Yes, as mentioned earlier, video is an important segment of the Turkish online market. To analyse this area, we apply the same solutions that are used in other markets by delivering data on the content viewed in streaming. While encoded content uses Javascript technology, the measurement of mobile applications is done using the Software Development Kit. By applying the SDK to the study of applications, we receive the information necessary to report content viewed in streaming, playback from mobile apps, and content monitored in offline mode.

Last time, Gemius worked to develop a research methodology integrating online media data with television data. How does this work in practice?

A few months ago, for the third time in a row, we won a tender to carry out an online measurement study in Turkey. Going into cross-media measurement is simple the answer to the needs of the media market all around the world as we observe an ever-closer interplay of television and the internet. We have already taken the first step – over the last year and a half, Gemius has been working hard on developing technology and methodology to enable us to adjust online research unit to TV standards – daily reach, which is the Gemius methodology known as Overnight. Our aim is to bring online and offline closer together, to join today separate ecosystems for marketing research and media planning purposes into one universe.

Is Gemius anticipating this kind of collaboration in Poland?

The Overnight methodology is already functioning on the Polish market. This is certainly a good time for the television and internet markets to find common grounds for collaboration.

Is the integration of various studies on media and advertising the future of research?

We have been observing the practices in force in the western markets where, via a single association of media companies covering television, online and newspaper editors, all projects in the field of media research are centrally managed; so I can confidently say that yes, this is the future of research. All activities are moving towards integration, but this integration may take different forms and pursue different objectives. One objective may be to increase incremental reach and collect more data used for media planning. Another objective may be to join forces with consumer researchers, such as TGI – Target Group Index, to enrich existing online media research with additional information about the target group, or to integrate data obtained from online studies of internet users with data management platforms (DMP), which connect with trading systems in real time.

This interview was published in TV Lider magazine.