measurement

Spanish-TV giant TelevisaUnivsion wants to speak a different language than its English-speaking rivals when it comes to audience measurement. “We all know that today’s TV measurement is inadequate for our multi-screen world, and as a consequence, U.S Hispanics have been undercounted,” says Donna Speciale, president of U.S. ad sales and marketing at the company. “In fact, our audience is 26% bigger than current measurement. How did we get that information? Nielsen just told us,” she says, using its traditional panel-based tabulation as well as its “big data” product. “This is huge and and a huge step for equity,” she adds, noting that TelevisaUnivision will ask all agencies and clients to base this year’s upfront ad deals on that measurement.

“Precise measurement and accurate counting are the foundation of a healthy and high-functioning TV advertising ecosystem. When marketers have the right data, they can make the right decisions. That’s why we’re unifying our audiences and ushering in a modern-day approach to measurement for local advertisers. To better reflect today’s sophisticated consumer, we are vastly increasing the number of households we measure: We used to measure 1 in every 1,600-2,000 homes in a Local DMA. Now we’re going to measure 1 in every 2-5 homes—giving advertisers an unprecedented understanding of the true size and value of their audience, while also allowing them to pinpoint the exact audience they want to reach. And there’s more: With 48-hour TV measurement reporting at this scale, we’ll be able to help our clients optimize and improve the precision of their media buys in near real time.”

With an upfront presentation and the upfront market a week away, Warner Bros. Discovery U.S. Ad Sales has added new measurement partners. The list includes 605, ABCS Insights, DISQO, EDO, LoopMe and Pilotly —  to add “greater attribution and efficacy of advertising campaigns” to work on cross-platform and advanced audience deals.

Buyers and sellers are still playing with alternative currencies such as VideoAmp, iSpot are Comscore, but nothing will take the place of C3/C7 ratings in a majority of this year’s upfront sales. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Audience measurement firm Comscore has struck a deal with Magna, part of IPG Mediabrands, to use Comscore’s local television ratings to “inform” local TV buys across the organization. The companies said Comscore is the only alternative ratings service that will be used by Magna for local television. The firm also uses the Nielsen local ratings.

Nielsen said the Alpha version of its Nielsen One system designed to measure the consumption of content is now being used by clients including The Walt Disney Co., Mediahub, Sony Pictures Television, TelevisaUnivision, AMC Networks and Horizon Media. The Alpha version focuses on program-level measurement across platforms. It will be more broadly released in late 2024, Nielsen said.

Following back-to-back salvos from Nielsen and Comscore earlier in the day, the fledgling U.S. “JIC” opened its upfront-style event Thursday afternoon on an escalatory note, with one opening panelists describing their moves in explicitly war-like terms.

Hours after Nielsen issued a notice to clients Thursday reaffirming its support of Media Rating Council (MRC), it received its own endorsement from a strange bedfellow: Rival audience measurement service Comscore. “Comscore joins with Nielsen in support of MRC accreditation and their call for greater trust and transparency in the selling process and for currency that is informed by big data.” Comscore’s statement was issued just before OpenAP’s and the VAB’s “joint industry committee (JIC) began its upfront-style pitch on its ad currency certification plans to the ad industry in New York City Thursday afternoon.

Allen Media Group told advertisers at its upfront lunch on Wednesday in New York that it has retained VideoAmp to handle TV measurement. “Nielsen does a horrible job,” said Byron Allen, Allen Media Group founder-CEO. Allen has sued Nielsen for fraud, alleging that Nielsen measurement failure cost his company money.

The U.S. Joint Industry Committee is preparing to answer the company’s concerns.

Nielsen said that it is not ready to participate in the recently formed Joint Industry Committee’s process for certifying companies that provide audience measurement. “There are fundamental legal, operational and scientific issues that will need to be resolved before Nielsen will agree to participate,” Karthik Rao, Nielsen CEO of global audience measurement, said in a letter to David Levy, CEO of OpenAP, which is organizing the JIC on behalf of most of the major traditional television programmers.

Looking to address the demand for growing cross-media platform measurement needs for this upfront selling period, a media-focused joint industry committee (JIC) of TV network-based media sellers — and now media agency holding companies  — will be holding an “upfront-style” event on April 27, at Aspire at One World Observatory in New York City.

The multi-year deal includes local TV stations, national networks and a regional cable channel.

The new capability includes feeds that have unique, streamed content that is not available on the station’s over-the-air channels or direct-to-cable station feeds.

Comscore is expanding its 48-hour reporting “Pulse” measurement service for all local TV stations — and national TV networks — in all 210 markets. This means Comscore can post data 48 hours after content airs in all markets. Previously, Comscore offered Pulse in the top 60 media markets, and in about half of those markets, advertisers and TV station clients could also get campaign pacing or demographic viewing-level data.

In a move likely to spark some ad industry controversy, the Advertising Research Foundation this morning issued a call to the industry to scrap the way it has defined the fundamental building block of television audience measurement — the so-called “TV household” — and replace it with a more encompassing one: the “TV-accessible household,” or TVA for short.

As the TV industry tries to set new standards for cross-platform measurement, YouTube, the streaming leader, wants in and the VAB, representing programmers, is pushing back.

iSpot and Nexstar’s The CW have announced that the network will use iSpot to measure cross-platform premium video campaigns and sponsorships associated with the 2023 LIV Golf Tournament across linear and digital properties.

The top media buying agencies have joined with most major programmers in setting standards for currency-level media measurement and the key measurement companies have been invited to be certified that they can meet those standards. GroupM, Publicis Media, Omnicom Media Group, IPG Mediabrands and RPA have become part of the working group that will be making decisions and certifying vendors for the U.S. Joint Industry Committee (JIC) on media measurement. Roku is the first streamer to join.

Despite dubious transparency and questionable methodologies, Nielsen remains a preeminent presence in measuring domestic TV audiences. And it’s monthly “Gauge” market share tracker, introduced in 2021, has continued to draw attention. On Wednesday, Nielsen released its latest graphic, highlighting U.S. TV usage for January. “Streaming” occupied 38.1% of the overall viewing pie. That’s up nearly 10% from the 28.9% it registered in Nielsen’s comparable “Gauge” from January 2022.

Long-time audience measurement exec Chris Wilson has joined startup HyphaMetrics as CEO, succeeding Joanna Drews, who moves to president and co-founder of the panel-based measurement service that hopes to compete directly with Nielsen’s TV meter products.

As the television industry looks for better ways to measure viewers, NBCUniversal wants the audience metrics used to buy and sell advertising to take into account the quality of the video and how much it engages consumers. NBCU on Wednesday is holding its annual pre-upfront presentation highlighting its data and technology capabilities for advertisers. This year’s event is called One23.

During a pre-upfront period when networks are looking to separate themselves from the competition, NBCUniversal has invited its rivals to speak at its annual tech and data presentation in order to promote the Joint Industry Committee formed by programmers to create modern standards and a certification process for audience measurement.

Disney Advertising and EDO, one of a growing handful of upstart companies hoping to offer new method of counting video viewers, have struck a pact that will have EDO examine audience engagement acorss Disney’s streaming assets, starting with Hulu.

Overall TV usage inched up in December, but streaming, cable and broadcast platforms all lost a bit of their market share. NBCUniversal’s Peacock service also broke into the individual streaming platform rankings. Nielsen’s monthly Gauge rankings of TV use show December 2022 had a tiny gain over November in the total time spent, growing by 0.3%. Most of that growth, however, came in the “other TV use” category and was driven by an increase in gaming on TV screens (the “other” category also includes physical media playback and some on demand viewing). The uptick in video game play brought other TV use to 6.3% of all time spent, up from 4.3% in November.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the TVB said they launched a study that will assess local TV measurement in the U.S. and develop an action plan to make improvements. The group has hired Sequent Partners to work on the project.

The media companies looking to form a joint industry committee to create standards for audience measurement have formally invited media agencies to join the organization. Letters were sent to all of the major agency holding companies Wednesday asking them to participate.

Netflix has expanded its measurement deal with Nielsen. Under the terms of the deal, Netflix will now subscribe to Nielsen’s national TV content measurement and streaming TV data services.

The commercial viability of premium programming hangs in the balance as a debate rages not just over who measures viewers and how to count them, but what content is included. Now, advertisers are looking for cross-screen measurement and a new can of worms has been opened. NBCUniversal is happy to let clients know the deduplicated reach and frequency of campaigns that run across NBC, USA Network and Peacock. (Ditto for The Walt Disney Co. with ABC, ESPN, Hulu and Disney+). Include user-generated content from the YouTubes and the TikToks of the world, or other forms of content that isn’t professionally created, though, and all bets are off.

Most of the biggest television programmers have banded together in a new attempt to fix what they see as an audience measurement problem and promote competition to Nielsen, ending its stranglehold on the industry. Comcast NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, TelevisaUnivision and the VAB said Monday they formed a Joint Industry Committee so they can work together to set standards for measuring what they call premium video, which generates $70 billion in advertising revenue.

The company says that the cross-platform measurement product will hit the market on Jan. 11, well ahead of the 2023 upfront negotiations, and fresh off the launch of new streaming tiers from Netflix and Disney+. Nielsen One Ads has been anticipated by marketers and media buyers, promising deduplicated measurement across linear TV, connected TV devices (i.e., Roku), mobile devices (like smartphones), and desktop computers.

This week’s CES event in Las Vegas will highlight solutions coupling interactive with measurement technologies for broadcasters, who have much to gain by upgrading their game to a more digital-like experience.

Warner Bros Discovery has enlisted measurement firm VideoAmp to track ad campaigns across screens for the company’s network and brand portfolio, which spans sports, news, lifestyle and entertainment. An announcement of the companies’ agreement said it followed the completion of a “first-of-its-kind test-and-learn” process designed to turn up alternative ways to gauge video ad performance.