measurement

TVNewsCheck‘s Michael Depp, Paige Albiniak and Michael Stahl discuss an eventful February for TV measurement with Nielsen’s introduction of BBO homes and NBCUniversal’s granular new metrics with iSpot.tv, plus how newsrooms’ assignment desks are weaning off police scanners and toward a more collaborative role.

Comcast’s advertising division said it has licensed viewing data from the set-top-boxes in subscribers’ home to VideoAmp, one of the measurement companies looking to provide an alternative to Nielsen in the race to provide a cross-platform currency for buying and selling TV advertising. Adding data from Comcast’s footprint should make VideoAmp’s product more stable and reliable, the companies said.

AT&T and State Farm are the latest big advertisers to experiment with new ways of figuring out just who is watching TV – and the commercials that support it. The two marketers are among those who are taking part in an alliance between Discovery and Omnicom Media Group. Under the pact, a handful of Omnicom clients, including the telecom and insurance giants, will test new ways of tabulating linear TV audiences using Comscore and VideoAmp, and examine recent viewership data.

While TV measurement moves to big data sets, panels remain crucial as lawsuits and widely varying claims roil the industry.

Amid the rising popularity of NFL games this season, one industry estimate predicts the Super Bowl’s live TV viewership will return to growth — rising between 110 million and 117 million viewers, according to PredictHQ, a marketing “demand forecasting” company. At 117 million viewers, that would be 20% higher than last year’s results, which pulled in 97.3 million viewers when totaling linear TV and streaming TV results, according to Nielsen.

Nielsen said it has launched a Diverse Media Equity Program, which is designed to highlight minority-owned media companies to advertisers and media buyers. Canela Media, a Latina-owned media company, was part of a pilot initiative and the number of campaigns it had that were measured by Nielsen tripled.

NBCUniversal, which has been active in the search for alternatives to Nielsen for audience measurement, is touting some metrics that could encourage its Olympic advertisers. The fancy metrics show that NBC’s coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics has fewer commercials and that those commercials are working hard, the kind of data NBCU believes is important to companies writing big checks to sponsor the games.

Nielsen is launching a Diverse Media Equity program to help bridge measurement and other structural gaps that have excluded minority-owned media companies from receiving their fair share of ad spend. The effort includes a new report quantifying reach and impact of diverse-owned media outlets and expanding access for minority-owned radio stations to Nielsen data, even if they can’t pay for subscriptions.

The Media Rating Council, the industry’s measurement watchdog, said that Comscore’s national and local TV measurement products are currently in the accreditation process and are undergoing an MRC audit. The MRC said the update is part of an effort to be more transparent.

TV’s very currency is in crisis, fueled by deepening questions of Nielsen’s accuracy. As the industry shifts its focus toward attribution, the company needs to pull itself out of its insular shell if it wants to create the future advertising currency and secure its own future.

The VAB today (Jan. 26) issued a report saying that Nielsen’s error in not counting some out-of-home viewing was a much bigger deal than the ratings firm let on and resulted in billions of impressions not being registered and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of TV ads unsold.

The research company admits that Don’t Look Up was “not fully credited” in its Christmas week rankings.

Sports betting will continue its meteoric rise in spot TV, Nielsen’s measurement footing will remain shaky and NextGen TV may finally deliver on new revenue streams for broadcasters in another challenging year ahead.

NBCUniversal, conducting a high-profile process to find measurement approaches that better fit the modern media world, tapped iSpot.TV as the first company in the stable it will use for quantifying cross-media video consumption in advertising sales transactions.

Comscore is launching Comscore Everywhere, a single-source unified cross-platform measurement service. This comes as Comscore continues to work specifically with other media networks and companies — NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, for example — in finding new measurement alternatives. One recent addition is an association with WarnerMedia, according to one report.

Comscore, a longtime rival to Nielsen in the business of measuring media audiences, is vowing to keep pace as advertisers seek new ways of counting viewers who watch their favorite shows in a dizzying array of new formats. Comscore said it would launch “Comscore Everywhere,” a measurement product that aims to count unduplicated audiences across various media and screens. The company, which expects to add new phases to the product throughout 2022, does so as Nielsen is working on a similar initiative, all part of a large-scale move by the media and advertising industries to use new technology to tabulate audience is more precise fashion and with more discrete methods.

The Wheel of Time channeled itself a primo spot on Nielsen’s U.S. streaming chart ranking the Top 10 original series for the week of Nov. 15. With just a few days of eligibility for this measuring period, Prime Video’s already-renewed fantasy saga adaptation (which bowed on Nov. 19) debuted at No. 1 with 1.6 billion minutes viewed across its first three episodes — making it the second most-watched Prime Video original since Hunters (in February 2020).

Nielsen is getting an early jump on Nielsen One, its cross-platform tool that will enable publishers and marketers to transact on a single metric across linear and digital platforms. While the metric isn’t set to roll out until next December, Nielsen will be debuting the first version of the offering — called Nielsen One Alpha duplicated ad measurement — at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Comscore said it acquired Shareablee, a measurement company that specializes in the social media space, for as much as $45 million on Thursday. Shareablee’s analytics are used by clients including Mondelez, GroupM,  ESPN, NBCUniversal and Vox Media.

Measurement and analytics company iSpot, one of the top challengers to Nielsen, said it signed a licensing deal with LG Ads Solutions that gives iSpot access to program and ad data from more than 20 million smart TVs.

The Media Rating Council (MRC) says it has begun auditing Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) measurement service, which put its accreditation on “hiatus” beginning in September 2020. The MRC said the audit includes four phases, including one covering Nielsen’s originally accredited service covering desktop display and video ratings, as well as new ones covering audience measurement coming from mobile and connected TV (CTV) devices.

Major agency holding companies GroupM, Dentsu and Horizon Media are among the framework’s earliest beta participants

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement is developing a guide to converged TV measurement providers in the United States. CIMM is working with The Project X Institute and TVRev on the guide, which aims to provide profiles and objective comparisons of the capabilities and services offered by all industry players offering cross-platform TV and video audience measurement services, including all forms of linear and streaming across all devices.

IPG’s Mediahub unit this morning announced a deal with Spanish-language media giant Univision to utilize third-party performance data as a “currency” for ad buys on its media outlets. Describing it as a “first-of-its-kind partnership,” the companies said they would utilize data and analytics from two suppliers — EDO Inc. and DatafuelX — to measure consumer behavior and to “predict engagement performance” for ad campaigns across Univision’s linear TV networks.

Comscore on Tuesday promoted Brian Pugh to chief information officer, a new post at the measurement company. Previously Comscore’s EVP of product technology, Pugh will be responsible for launching cost-effective technology-based products that ensure that the company’s data is secure and privacy-compliant. He will also oversee the accreditation of the company’s measurement services.

Alan Wolk: The number of set-top boxes is shrinking, while the number of smart TVs is growing at a similarly steady rate. This is likely to make measurement harder to calculate in the years to come.

NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Nielsen and more are seeking the best way to provide accurate, usable information to buyers and sellers.

Projected to take effect in the first half of 2022, the new system relies on a third-party logistics firm called Extreme Reach. The company will help Nielsen encode most national linear TV commercials with the company’s watermarks, enabling them to be tracked as ads are in the digital world. As opposed to transacting on the amount of overall commercial minutes in a programming block, ad buyers and sellers will be able to get more granular, “sub-minute” numbers.

The company held its first industry-wide measurement innovation forum on Tuesday.

Every Tuesday, Netflix will update the site “Top10 on Netflix” with the top 10 series and films on the streaming service. Until now, Netflix has been selective in sharing viewership data. It has occasionally shared views for hits, and it logs a top 10 list, without data, on the service, itself.

Netflix is backing up its promise of more transparency into metrics with the launch of a new website that will feature weekly lists ranking shows and movies by their total hours viewed. The streaming giant, which had for the past two years counted a “view” as anytime one of its subscribers watched at least two minutes of a show or movie, is now formally shifting to total hours viewed as its standard metric.

After years of complaints, NBCUniversal and its peers are looking for other ways to count viewers, with or without the ratings giant. Next Tuesday, NBCUniversal plans to host a forum to discuss alternative ways to measure its audience. Representatives of major advertising agencies, industry trade groups and companies including Ford Motor, L’Oreal and Pfizer are expected to attend. NBCUniversal is also sifting through proposals from 80 measurement companies, Nielsen among them, to create new methods for quantifying viewers.