Networks haven’t been getting full credit from Nielsen for all of the people watching live television through streaming services, the ratings firm acknowledged Wednesday, illustrating the pressures on the measurement company to keep up with the rapid evolution of viewing habits.
Over the years, Google trained computer systems to keep copyrighted content and pornography off its YouTube service. But after seeing ads from Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart appear next to racist, anti-Semitic or terrorist videos, its engineers realized their computer models had a blind spot: They did not understand context. Now teaching computers to understand what humans can readily grasp may be the key to calming fears among big-spending advertisers that their ads have been appearing alongside videos from extremist groups and other offensive messages.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is committing to a series of audits for its web video powerhouse YouTube by the ad industry’s measurements watchdog, the Media Rating Council. Less than two weeks ago, Facebook also announced it had agreed to have some of its ad metrics audited by the MRC.
Mike Shields parses the conflict arising between Web video companies making claims to comparable — or larger — audiences than their television competitors, a battle that hit a new high at the recent NewFronts. He looks in particular into dubious claims by Fullscreen over its How to Survive High School web show.
In an important stamp of approval making comScore’s digital audience measurement more of an industry currency, the Media Rating Council voted to grant accreditation to comScore’s Media Metrix service. The service, which measures publisher website audiences based on comScore’s “unified digital measurement” method, is the first digital content audience measurement service accredited by the MRC.
In a move that seems to reposition itself from its original intent of measuring the audiences of online advertising, Nielsen this morning announced a rebranding of its fledgling Online Campaign Ratings service as the Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings. “The new name better describes Nielsen’s total digital view, inclusive of mobile,” Nielsen said in a statement explaining the name change, but the term digital likely could be used to position it across other digital advertising platforms as they emerge.
Exclusives
Nielsen will begin offering data on viewing by Netflix and Amazon Prime subscribers for the first time starting midyear, CEO Mitch Barns said Tuesday. “That will be the last significant portion of overall television content viewing that we don’t already measure,” Barns said.
For a very long time, media buyers and planners have been pushing for a gross ratings point, a way to compare online ad buys to those made in other media. That time is not yet here, but it’s getting closer. The Media Rating Council has lifted a ban on using viewable impressions as the currency for online buys, ending a moratorium established in November 2012.
Google has teamed up with Nielsen and has begun quietly inviting select clients to begin testing ad campaigns sold using online campaign ratings data.
The Web giant issues bold guarantees regarding its online GRP’s as Nielsen and AOL push the new model to advertisers still casting about for a convincing measurement metric.
C3 Metrics, a leader in so-called “attribution” modeling and analytics for online media, has tapped well-known TV researcher to lead the development and strategy for its move into television: John Dimling, the former CEO of Nielsen, and former head of media industry watchdog the Media Rating Council.
