The country of 340 million TV households is set for an advertising boom, helped by Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, as local and foreign firms vie for increasingly affluent consumers, America's top TV ratings company said.

"We envisage there will be at least double-digit growth in the next 10 years," Rita Chan, Nielsen's director of client services, said in an interview before unveiling plans to expand TV ratings coverage for China.

Domestic and foreign firms are queuing up to tap a consumer market identified as one of the world's fastest growing, propelled by booming economic growth and burgeoning consumerism.

Many are launching aggressive campaigns, enlisting Asian celebrities such as NBA basketball star Yao Ming to advertise products from soft drinks to mobile phones.

As the average Chinese becomes more image conscious, snazzier healthcare product ads and shampoo ads are crowding out traditional commercials for alcohol, Chan said.

"I remember back in 1990, Chinese liquor played a very important role, and in the mid-1990s we had VCDs (video compact disc). And then in the late 90s and early 2000s, we saw a lot of health supplement products," she said.

To keep pace with rapidly shifting Chinese tastes, Nielsen plans to include more cities in its existing ratings system.

Nielsen now measures television ratings in 11 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing, and now plans to expand that by 10 times in two years.

Nielsen's plans to cover the whole of southern Guangdong province might help Hong Kong stations such as Television Broadcasts Ltd, whose signals spill across the border, to gauge their mainland audience.

A number of media giants such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and AOL Time Warner have also landed broadcasting rights in the province, considered a test-bed for foreign programming.

"The entire expansion will be completed in a little less than two years," said Forrest Didier, Nielsen's Asia Pacific managing director.

"With the expansion from the 3,300 households to almost 25,000 households, probably we will be able to effectively measure the viewing habits of 820 million TV viewers in China," he told a news conference.

(China Daily June 19, 2003)