Nielsen

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.

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.

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.

Nielsen’s monthly snapshot shows sports and fall dramas helping networks gain; You passes Squid Game in the weekly rankings.

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.

Nielsen has begun internal tests of its new multimedia audience measurement methodology, Nielsen One, and will begin testing it with clients next year, the company’s top management executives said during a briefing with a Wall Street securities firm. “Most of the methodology is built from Big Data sources like [connected TV] makers and Roku, but Nielsen’s panel remains vital to calibrating the data for fraudulent accounts, non-viewed content (e.g., streaming or set-top box showing video, but TV is off) and better accounting for underrepresented audiences,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Daniel Salmon disclosed in a report sent to investors.

After a difficult period earlier this year, when Nielsen was criticized for undercounting national TV viewers, the media measurement company says business has been good of late. Nielsen says third quarter revenue was up 5.5% to $882 million — with its audience measurement business gaining 3.9% to $637 million and its Outcomes & Content unit improving 9.9% to $245 million. Net income was $103 million versus $10 million in the year-ago period.

The move is designed to let publishers measure channel content on Roku devices within Nielsen Digital Content Ratings.

‘Client discretion’ is the reason HBO Max shows aren’t included in the research company’s weekly ranker, an insider says.

Nielsen is defending its use of old-school panels to measure TV viewing as much of the business looks to rely more on Big Data to create alternatives to the ratings measurement firm that has infuriated and dominated the industry for decades.

Nielsen rolled out a new brand identity today at the start of Advertising Week in New York.

Viewers are increasingly ditching broadcast entertainment for streaming, Nielsen is being challenged as the default for metrics and tech giants are siphoning ad dollars once spent on linear television — but that doesn’t mean TV ads are dead.

Nielsen says it now captures 100% of streaming minutes viewed on the TV glass, 75% of CTV media spend and 87% of total video digital spend across computer, mobile and connected TV.

The support came after the Media Rating Council suspended Nielsen’s accreditation, which prompted reaction in some quarters.

Nielsen announced today that it will take the lead on an “Impressions First Initiative” to support an industry-wide move to impressions-based buying and selling in local markets across the country. The move to impressions will occur in conjunction with the integration of broadband only homes into Nielsen’s local measurement metrics in January 2022.

Against a backdrop of Nielsen issues with TV measurement and ongoing advertiser disaffection with the way all media are measured, the Association of National Advertisers has come out with some baseline requirements for measurement.

The TV networks aren’t the only ones who think their audiences need to be counted differently. Big media-buying agencies and even a few advertisers are likely to help as the TV industry battles with Nielsen and continues to push for alternate systems of counting video viewers, whether they watch via traditional linear TV or a new streaming-video hub.

In a letter sent today to advertisers, agencies, broadcasters and others in the media industry, David Kenny CEO of the firm, which in August had its national and local TV panels lose their third-party accreditation, promised to accelerate the rollout of Nielsen One, the company’s forthcoming cross-platform measurement tool that aims to solve some of the industry’s most nagging measurement problems — but is not projected to be fully implemented until 2024.

The TV industry is trying to figure out how it will do business in a world where Nielsen is no longer the dominant measurement company. On Sept. 1, the Media Rating Council stripped its seal of approval from Nielsen’s national TV measurement product, long the industry’s gold standard. “The only thing we know for sure is how dissatisfied a lot of the networks are and how serious they are about advancing measurement,” said Sean Muller, CEO of iSpot.TV, one of the companies hoping to move into any void created by Nielsen’s issues.

The company faces a double whammy: challenges in its legacy products and customers looking for alternative ways to measure streaming viewership.

TV viewers can watch their favorite programs any way they want. If media executives aren’t careful, the industry will soon be counting those people in equally chaotic fashion. A suspension of Media Rating Council backing for Nielsen’s venerable national and local TV ratings service, announced Wednesday, offers the clearest signal yet of the breakdown of the industry’s ability to measure the audiences that watch comedies, dramas, news broadcasts and sports matches. The problem is not likely to be solved anytime soon.

Nielsen’s decades-old track record of measuring the TV business was dealt a serious blow Wednesday after the MRC decided to suspend its backing of the company’s national ratings service and also cancel an agreed-upon hiatus for its support of Nielsen’s local TV efforts as well.

Nielsen seems to be betting the industry will shrug off its loss of accreditation.

As NBCUniversal puts Nielsen on notice, pressing questions arise of what a new ad measurement system should include. The answer must come out of studying Nielsen’s pain points and navigating privacy issues with which digital media currently grapple.

NBCUniversal, which has sparred publicly with Nielsen in recent years, has issued a call for “measurement independence” in the media industry. In an open letter, NBCU did not say it would outright shun Nielsen, which remains the dominant force in measurement despite challenges from Comscore and others. But it urged all measurement companies to offer alternative means of tracking viewing across linear TV and digital platforms.

Dave Morgan: “There was a time when the media measurement market was pretty simple. You had Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers for newspaper ad buys, BPA for magazines, Arbitron for radio and Nielsen for TV. No more. Digital disruption, the rise of performance advertising — and, most importantly, massive and accelerating audience fragmentation across an expanding number of media channels, suppliers and devices — are to blame.”

Under well-deserved pressure from the Video Advertising Bureau and the Media Rating Council — not to mention Discovery’s David Zaslav — Nielsen is facing a potentially existential moment. It would do well not to revert to its usual defensive crouch and, instead, engage in a straightforward and transparent dialogue with its clients.

The Media Rating Council ripped Nielsen’s “deep-rooted, ongoing performance issues” in a statement. That followed Nielsen’s declaration that it would seek to take a hiatus from the Council’s accreditation process.

TVNewsCheck‘s Michael Depp and TVB President-CEO Steve Lanzano discuss persistent agency silos, audience measurement woes and automation resistance in the world of TV advertising, prompting the question of whether the whole business could use some time on the couch to work through its issues.

Nielsen said Thursday it would move forward without the backing of the media industry’s Media Rating Council, the latest eyebrow-raising maneuver in a months-long feud between the media-measurement giant and the TV networks whose viewers it has counted for decades.

The multiyear agreement Includes measurement for all Meredith local stations and includes Nielsen Scarborough.

Nielsen says its new wearable Portable People Meters will be foundational to Nielsen ONE for cross-media audience insights for national and local TV and audio measurement.

Discovery President-CEO David Zaslav ramped up his ire for TV ratings giant Nielsen during a Tuesday conference call tied to Discovery’s second-quarter earnings. The future calls for “better data” than the long-standing measurement currency company offers, Zaslav said. “Unfortunately, Nielsen is a whiff. And it’s just massively disappointing. We have lost money. Everyone has lost money. You’re dealing with a very antiquated delivery system.”

The company says its Digital Ad Ratings measures nearly 90% of total digital video spend in the U.S.; more than 60% resiliency against the loss of third-party identifiers.

The industry group that represents major television networks is calling on the nonprofit Media Rating Council to strip Nielsen’s accreditation in an unprecedented escalation of a months-long feud centered on the accuracy of Nielsen ratings. On Wednesday morning, the Video Advertising Bureau, which counts A+E Networks, Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS (among others) as members, delivered a letter to the MRC demanding that it suspend its accreditation of Nielsen’s national ratings service due to the measurement firm’s handling of its in-home panel. That panel, which serves as the backbone of Nielsen’s television measurement products, has been cast into doubt since at least March 2020.