Nielsen

Time Warner has signed up Nielsen as a strategic partner for its Medialab. The partnership builds on Medialab’s existing neuroscience research — including biometric and eye-tracking technology, enhanced facial coding, behavioral coding and EEG technology.

In what appears to be an ongoing battle of attrition, cable networks lost about 2.5% of their subscribers in new universe estimates released by Nielsen. The estimates, which are Nielsen’s official numbers for April, suggest an acceleration of cable’s erosion, and compare with a year-to-date decline of about 2%.

Although total video consumption in 2015 was flat, consumers tuned in just a little bit more during the year’s fourth quarter. Viewing during that time was up just under 1% when you include live TV, time-shifted TV, desktop online video, DVD/Blu-Ray viewing, tablets, smartphones and multimedia/OTT devices. 

Steve Haskar, Nielsen’s new COO, says he hopes once the total audience data is available to the public, the industry will see that the company is indeed making strides in measuring across platforms. Media companies are seeing an audience lift about 10% from additional platforms, he says.

Fox is joining the parade of TV companies testing the market to see if Madison Avenue is ready to do some deals without relying on that old standby, TV audience measurement from Nielsen, The Fox Networks unit of 21st Century Fox, which operates Fox Broadcasting, Fox Sports 1 and FX, among other TV properties, will offer its advertisers the chance to do deals based on how many members of a specific kind of consumer it can reach, says Toby Byrne, president of ad sales for Fox Networks Group.

While most demographics are relatively flat in the Nielsen Universe Estimate Report for 2016 versus the same period a year ago, those 65 and older witnessed an increase. Those 65 and older now account for 40 persons out of 100 TV homes — up from 38 out of 100 a year ago.

Nielsen today said it has completed its purchase of Pointlogic, a global provider of marketing decision support systems. With clients in more than 100 countries, Pointlogic software is used in […]

Will Somers says Nielsen takes forever to release its Live + 7 Day data, which is why Somers and Co. settled for sharing three-day delayed numbers at the earliest. “Personally, I think [Live + 7 Days] makes more sense,” Somers said. “We want to report as comprehensive a measure of our audience as possible.”

Snapchat has called on Nielsen to provide third-party data on its advertising campaigns. It’s also working with ad tech companies Innovid and Sizmek for more granular data on campaigns’ performance, rectifying a long lament from the advertiser community about a lack of data from the platform.

Respondents say comScore can develop into a real challenger with the launch of its cross-platform ratings this spring, and they heartily approve, believing that more media measurement competition is always a good thing.

The growing influence of streaming video on-demand services, time-shifting and social media have all had a well-documented impact on the landscape of linear TV and the way people watch their favorite shows. Yet despite the multiple ways we can access programming, one type of programming remains DVR-resistant: sports.

There are only a handful of live events that can capture the attention of people across America. While the telecast of Super Bowl 50 did not have the last-minute heroics of previous championship games, it had something for everyone — including marketers and TV stations. Nielsen analyzed household and demographic data for 70 markets to evaluate how the Super Bowl performed at a local level.

The TV ratings currency company renewed its contract with Hearst a day before releasing earnings. Nielsen’s fourth-quarter 2015 revenue of $1.62 billion came in just above Wall Street’s forecast of $1.61 billion.

The long-term agreement provides for audience measurement of Hearst’s 30 stations and most of its subchannels in 26 markets.

The long-term agreement provides for audience measurement of all of Media General’s stations.

Nielsen, the 93-year-old company that has long operated an effective monopoly over television ratings in the United States, is facing blistering criticism from TV and advertising executives who see it as a relic of television’s rabbit-ears past as the digital revolution transforms how people consume entertainment. New competition — notably the $768 million merger this week of the media measurement companies comScore and Rentrak — is forcing Nielsen to evolve.

A recent Nielsen study explored how identifying the right dayparts and programs in local markets can effectively reach voters across the full political spectrum including Super Democrats, Ultra Conservatives and On-The-Fence Liberals, as well as Conservative Democrats, Left-Out Democrats, Mild Republicans, Uninvolved Conservatives and Green Traditionalists. For the study, Nielsen matched TV viewing data from second-quarter 2015 with voter segmentation data in the Cleveland, Denver and Tampa-St. Petersburg DMAs.

When Nielsen launched its Twitter TV Ratings in the fall of 2013, it hoped to measure a great deal of the conversation about TV shows taking place in the social-media sphere. Now the company will have to contend with a lot more chatter. The company will expand its work to Facebook, and, at a later date, Instagram, and will measure aggregate-level conversation related to TV shows taking place in posts shared with friends and family, with followers and with the public at large.

If Nielsen isn’t going to do a good enough job accurately measuring TV to satisfy NBCUniversal, the conglomerate isn’t about to stand idly by. That’s the word from Linda Yaccarino, chairman of ad sales and client partnerships, who on Thursday issued a call to action for the entire industry to make their frustrations known. “It’s unfair to marketers, it’s unfair to content creators, and it’s up to all of us in this industry to take a stand,” said Yaccarino. “We need to reach beyond a C3 rating.”

Social media continues to expand its reach as a media vehicle. In its third-quarter media report, Nielsen says 156 million adult consumers engaged in social networking on a smartphone alone for an average week in the third quarter of 2015 — about 65% of the U.S. population. This amounts to a 13% increase from the same period of a year ago. TV reaches about 85% of all adults in a given week.

Effective today, none of the demographic data reported by Nielsen’s local TV ratings services will be accredited. The move follows Nielsen’s decision to drop paper diaries for estimating the demographic composition of audiences in its local metered market ratings and to begin using new, as-yet-unaccredited methods for calculating who is watching television. As a result, media industry self-regulatory ratings watchdog the Media Rating Council announced Wednesday that none of Nielsen’s local demographic data will be accredited.

As Nielsen transitions today to a controversial method for modeling its national TV ratings, those ratings remain accredited, according to a statement issued by the industry’s ratings watchdog. While the statement from the Media Rating Council noted important items and questions “remain outstanding,” it affirmed that Nielsen’s national ratings will “remain accredited,” at least until early 2016 when it will “reevaluate the accreditation status.”

Nielsen has released its first Comparable Metrics Report, which is intended to simplify comparisons across all media platforms. The report focuses on how many adult consumers access a given platform or content type in an average week. Nielsen measures its total usage of different media platforms among adults by age, race, and ethnicity — as well as breaking out digital measurement into video, streaming audio, and social networking.

Nielsen data show an increase in the number of 18-to-34-year-olds who used a smartphone, tablet or TV-connected device like a streaming box or game console. That grew 26% in May compared with a year earlier, to an average of 8.5 million people per minute. Those devices, which all showed gains in usage, more than offset declines in TV, radio and computers. In the same age group, the demographic most highly coveted by advertisers, use of those devices fell 8% over the same period to a combined 16.6 million people per minute.

Increasing its household sample and adding online viewing to TV ratings could well lead to spikes in audiences and a flow of ad dollars to once unrated shows. John Morse, head of the full-service media marketing research company Byron Media, talks about how the changes will resonate in media, whether buyers will ever pay for month-long DVR playback, and what measurements he’s still waiting to see.

New ratings that combine digital and TV are coming by year’s end, and buyers desire MRC accreditation and transparency above all else. Using the ratings as currency for ad buys is a long way off.

Nielsen is putting the finishing touches on total audience measurement and gave Adweek an exclusive look at its new multiplatform measurement tool, which it says will forever change the industry. The company will begin sharing data with its clients this December and roll out the tool’s full capabilities early next year.

A recent Nielsen global survey found that trust levels in advertising have remained fairly consistent across earned, owned and paid formats over the past two years. Millennials (age 21-34), who came of age with the Internet, have the highest levels of trust in online and mobile formats. While that may not come as a surprise, it’s not just online and mobile advertising formats where millennials exceed the average. They also show the highest levels of trust in 18 of 19 advertising formats/channels, including TV, newspapers and magazines.

CBS is the first broadcast network to include digital audience measurement in its television ratings by incorporating Nielsen’s SDK metering technology into the CBS All Access experience within the network’s mobile apps and online video player.

“By the end of this year, we’ll have most of these pieces in place,” said Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s global president, referring to the firm’s total audience measurement, which he said will provide a total audience read across all linear and digital platforms daily. The new data, he added Monday, will give advertisers, buyers and networks “the ammunition to move beyond C3 and C7” when it comes to advertising metrics.

To help media companies get faster and easy access to TV research, Nielsen has “opened” up its data in launching a series of programming tools — APIs (application programming interfaces) — for its TV services.

Nielsen’s second-quarter 2015 Total Audience Report shows that despite growth in digital video use, TV accounts for half of all media use for weekday and weekends between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. TVB President Steve Lanzano says the report shows “that TV remains consumers’ medium of choice and as such, continues to be the most effective and powerful marketing medium.”   

Despite the decision to postpone the roll out of the controversial new diary replacement system for local TV until Jan. 1, Nielsen’s Matt O’Grady tells the TVB crowd it is the way to go. “I know there are plenty of questions about this remodel. However, I also know that remodeling is the future for us to assign demos to big-data sets. I know we can get it right.”

Of Nielsen’s 210 Designated Market Areas, 39 increased their positions, while 46 dropped in the new 2015-16 rankings. There were seven changes in the top 20 markets affecting Washington, Boston, Tampa, Phoenix, Detroit, Cleveland and Orlando. Of all the moves, the largest was three slots.

The ratings firm says it’s moving the introduction of its new system that would replace paper diaries from Oct. 1 to January following “significant feedback” from clients concerned about the so-called “viewer assignment” methodology the new system is using to derive demographic data for stations in smaller markets from larger local people-meter markets, some located far away.

As the October deadline by which Nielsen hopes to start rolling out its replacement for the paper diary nears, some broadcasters are upset. They say the initial results from the code reader system are giving them lower ratings and questionable demos. Meanwhile, the Media Rating Council is taking a hard look before giving the system its blessing.