measurement

The CTO will head up product, engineering, research & development at the TV measurement firm.

Comscore said that it made a deal with Fox Television Stations in which the stations will use Comscore-based currency to transact advanced audience advertising deals. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Amazon paid big bucks for the exclusive national broadcast rights to stream NFL Thursday Night Football starting this season, but 48% of the viewership for Prime Video’s first preseason game came via local broadcast, according to TVB. Stations in San Francisco and Houston delivered 494,135 impressions.

Amazon Studios on Saturday said its much-anticipated series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, broke viewership records, with more than 25 million people tuning in to watch on the first day. The show, based on the appendices of The Return of the King, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday in more than 240 territories and countries.

Nielsen, which has been touting that Nielsen One, its new cross-platform measurement system, is on track, quietly informed clients last week that the “big data” on which the platform relies isn’t ready to be used to make transactions. Nielsen had planned to include its big data — information on viewing from set-top boxes and smart TVs — in its national TV ratings in September and have clients use it as currency in the scatter advertising market. Nielsen has been trying to get its new national ratings system incorporating big data accredited by the Media Rating Council but a meeting scheduled for today (Aug. 25) was postponed.

David Algranati is named CIO, Greg Dale is now COO and Jon Lieberman becomes CTO, while Chris Wilson, chief commercial officer, will be leaving the company.

Streaming TV is now No. 1, with its share of viewing in July topping cable TV for the first time, according to new figures from Nielsen. Streaming had a 38.8% share of viewing in July, up 3.2% from June and jumping 22.6% from a year ago. That beat cable, which was down 2% from June and 8.9% from a year ago with a 34.4% share. Broadcast had a 21.6% share, down 3.7% from June and 9.8% lower than a year ago..

In its first full week of availability on Netflix, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman was watched for 127.5 million hours, landing in the No. 1 position on the streamer’s newly released Top 10 rankings. This week, the. Aug. 8-14 viewing window, marks the series’ second at the top of the chart after its debut last week with 69.5 million hours.

The e-commerce giant wants to give advertisers familiar ratings but hints that it will also leverage purchase data.

With the coming of its new cross-platform media-measurement service Nielsen One next year, Nielsen says all its media panels have seen growth — including its highly scrutinized national TV panel, which has grown to more than 42,000 homes and 101,000 “directly measured viewers.” Nielsen’s national TV panel has been measuring around 36,000 to 38,000 viewers, according to third-party estimates, during the pandemic periods in 2020 and 2021.

Comscore said it reduced its second-quarter net loss as revenues rose 4.3%. The measurement company lost $5.1 million, or 10 cents a share, in the quarter, compared to $87.7 million, or 28 cents, a year ago. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization was $6.5 million, up from $2.6 million. Revenue was $91.4 million, up from $87.7 million.

Shares of media-measurement giant Nielsen surged Tuesday after the purveyor of TV ratings said its largest shareholder reached an initial agreement to support a $10 billion buyout of the TV ratings company by a a group of private-equity firms.

New measurement providers got a workout in the upfront — 85% of the networks surveyed by the Video Advertising Bureau said they increased their use or investment in alternate audience data providers. Most deals continued to be done using Nielsen, but the networks and advertisers were aggressive in talking about trying out alternate services because of complaints about Nielsen undercounting viewers and losing its accreditation from the Media Rating Council.

Nielsen reported higher second quarter earnings and said its new ratings system would roll out on schedule as it looks to complete being acquired by a private equity group. Net income rose to $111 million, or 31 cents a share, compared to $76 million, or 21 cents a share a year ago. Revenue rose 2.4% to $822 million.

American television viewers spent more than a third of their time with streaming platforms in June, an all-time high. Nielsen’s monthly platform rankings show streaming taking up 33.7% of viewing time for the month, up from 31.9% in May and the highest mark since the measurement company began its monthly “Gauge” report in May 2021.

The measurement firm says media buyers can now compare YouTube reach from computer, mobile and CTV to linear TV, a “foundational step” toward achieving Nielsen ONE.

The GOP commissioner says if deep ties to single-source data are an impediment, they should be severed.

Continuing dissatisfaction with and distrust in Nielsen is leading stations, agencies and brands to seek measurement alternatives. 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.

He’s tapped to succeed current CEO and executive vice chairman Bill Livek who is retiring.

Nielsen and agencies have cited a lack of Mediaocean integration as a barrier for new currencies, but VideoAmp and Comscore now have cleared it, and iSpot.tv could be next.

NBCUniversal’s ambitions to reinvent measurement have now extended to embrace emotion and ad quality, but can some factors be too abstract to quantify?

The media agency announced today it will test Comscore’s local TV measurement for the 2023 media buying and planning period.

Do you know what parts of an ad campaign truly ignite your customers? Is it a beloved celebrity? Or a compelling story? Don’t we really want to know if a great, emotional ad gets the proper credit when we measure campaign performance? As a publisher, NBCUniversal knows how important the role of emotions can be. Emotional relationships to our content are what fuels fandom. It’s why we constantly test our content to understand feelings like brand love, because emotional connections with our fans can have tangible benefits for brands. And the same kind of rigor publishers apply to premium content needs to be applied to the quality of the ads as it runs alongside it.

TelevisaUnivision is getting more entrenched in TV’s measurement wars. The Spanish-language media giant is teaming up with data company VideoAmp, one of a growing number of audience-measurement companies whose services are being tapped as TV networks mull alternatives to Nielsen, the industry’s de factor arbiter of audience size. Under terms of the pact, TelevisaUnivision will use VideoAmp’s data in a suite of advanced advertising solutions, giving advertisers a better sense of the viewers they are reaching and their responses to commercials.

In the middle of an upfront in which measurement is a key issue, one of the biggest media buyers in the world is making its position clear on what it will use for currency in 2022-23 and how it is preparing for the future. GroupM said it will continue to transact using Nielsen data for the upfronts. But it also said it will be using alternative currencies, including outcome-based approaches, with a dozen of its largest clients to shadow its Nielsen-based deals.

Bill Livek, who announced plans to retire as CEO of Comscore at the end of 2022, bought 600,000 shares of Comscore stock for $1.15 million, according to a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Livek purchased the shares on May 31 and June 1 for prices between $1.90 and $1.93 a share. He now owns 2.4 million shares of Comscore.

Nielsen has expanded its Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) service to include a simpler version of reporting on connected TVperson-level audiences across all smart TV manufacturers and streaming providers.

How did the simple act of counting TV viewers become so controversial? David Kenny thinks he knows. The CEO of Nielsen has been under fire for months, ever since some of his company’s biggest customers — the nation’s TV networks — began to complain about how Nielsen tabulated viewers during the coronavirus pandemic. They are still complaining. And Nielsen faces a host of upstart rivals with whom the networks are striking new measurement deals. But Kenny says he isn’t letting their maneuvering get in the way of Nielsen’s future.

Nielsen, which has agreed to be acquired by a private-equity group led by Elliott Investment Management, said that its go-shop period has expired without an alternative proposal to buy the company emerging.

Three important ad trade bodies – the Association of National Advertisers, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Advertising Research Foundation’s Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) – Thursday said they are fielding a new study to “explore the industry’s transition to a multi-currency TV market in the U.S.” The study comes as a perfect storm of developments have led up to a Babel-like 2022-23 upfront marketplace, in which a variety of “alternate” currencies are being promoted alongside the industry’s legacy currency — Nielsen — and not one of them currently is accredited by industry self-regulatory body, the Media Rating Council.

Measurement giants faced off at the NewFronts Thursday, as Nielsen alternatives pitched a next generation in TV and video currency, while Nielsen contended you can’t really trust numbers from its rivals’ big data sets.