February Ushers In Big Changes To TV Measurement World

February was a historic month in the deeply disrupted and rapidly changing world of media measurement.

It was the first time that NBC broadcast and streamed both the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in the same month. NBC took advantage of that situation to work closely with iSpot.tv and other vendors that are part of the company’s Measurement Innovation Task Forum to dig into viewership and see what was happening across what will be the network’s two biggest platforms this year. That work will continue going forward with NBCUniversal running its test-and-learn program through the first quarter of 2022.

Meanwhile, after two delays, Nielsen finally integrated broadband-only (BBO) homes into its local universe samples on Jan. 6. TV station groups are seeing the results of that data. As expected, local TV universes grew as a result of adding in those homes but by how much continues to be under scrutiny. Nielsen’s early results show that BBO homes now make up as much as 29% of the local universe sample, while other data sets compiled by competitive companies say that number is closer to 21%-23%.

Both efforts are pushing the industry closer to agreed-upon ways to measure and buy against media consumption, even if those efforts never result in a single currency like the one the industry has relied upon until now — ratings.

By anyone’s numbers, NBC’s airing of this year’s Super Bowl was a success. According to Nielsen, the big game averaged a total audience delivery of 112.3 million viewers, while it reached 167 million viewers, making it the most-watched program across all of television on any platform in five years. The Super Bowl also was the most streamed NFL game in history, with an average-minute audience of 11.2 million viewers.

NBCU also provided advertising metrics from iSpot.tv, which found that an average advertisement reached 106 million viewers, while the game generated 4.39 billion household impressions across all platforms. iSpot.tv has contracts with providers Vizio, LG and more to collect information from 39 million smart TVs.

Similarly, NBC has been providing advertising metrics throughout the Beijing Winter Olympics, which wrapped on Sunday, Feb. 20.

Through Friday, Feb. 17, Nielsen reported that nearly seven in 10 Americans — or a total of 215.6 million — watched those two events on NBCU’s networks, not counting Spanish-language Telemundo, between the start of NBCU’s Olympics coverage on Wednesday, Feb. 2, through Super Bowl Sunday on Sunday, Feb. 13. In addition, viewers consumed 5 billion streaming minutes of both events across all digital platforms, led by NBCU’s own Peacock.

What was different this year is that NBCU, with its measurement partners, is also providing clients with incremental data about advertising consumption across all platforms.

“Olympics advertisers are seeing advertising delivering for the first time across linear and streaming and digital and understanding the overlap,” says Kelly Abcarian, EVP, measurement and impact, advertising and partnerships, NBCUniversal. “When you think about understanding historical events, such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics, it was never a measurement of the ads, it was always a measurement of the programming with the assumption that the ads traveled. We’re moving away from talking about the programming audiences and talking about including the ads as well.”

“What it boils down to is three things,” says Sean Muller, CEO, iSpot.TV, which is working closely with NBCU on its initial test-and-learn efforts. “We’re providing truly cross-screen measurement instead of cobbling together different measurement systems across platforms. We’re delivering that measurement at speed and we’re measuring ads independently of the programs.”

For Abcarian, the ability to provide clients with this level of granular data marks a watershed moment in TV measurement, which is moving away from ratings and toward more thorough looks at consumer behavior.

“We are headed towards a new measurement era, and we are at the beginning of that era,” Abcarian says. “This data brings real value to our advertisers and marks a critical turning point. We are now able to give our advertisers a complete picture of performance and allow them to get real-time insights and see how that performance is being delivered.

“It takes advertisers 12 to 14 days to see any understanding of their performance on linear,” she continues. “A ratings point offers this industry no or limited value when you start to speak in the way that these brands want to understand how to measure impact to their brands. They are not buying ratings; they are buying the value of [these events]. Our job is to bring forward the metrics that matter to connect to that investment.”

Change is coming somewhat slower to local markets, where it’s harder to measure viewership because viewer behavior is extrapolated across relatively small sample sizes. That model worked well enough in an era where all viewers consumed television in linear dayparts on in-home television sets, but now that viewers can watch what they want at any time on any device, that model has become outdated.

TV station group leaders are pressing Nielsen and other providers to provide granularity and transparency at the local level. Right now, using panels to extrapolate viewership is resulting in money being left on the table, they say.

“If you look at Nielsen’s numbers around the acceleration that they are claiming exists in the market, they are showing a growth rate that indicates BBO homes grew just as much in the past 10 months as they did in the prior two and a half years,” Abcarian says. “When you look at Nielsen’s past six years of history, we were at 4% penetration in 2016 and 18% at the start of COVID in March 2020. Now, according to Nielsen, we’re at almost 29%, while external sources who are not Nielsen say we’re between 21% and 23%. What is Nielsen doing to study and understand this?”

Some local broadcasters, such as Hearst, which owns top-performing news stations in large to mid-size markets, don’t mind adding broadband-only homes to the mix. Expanding the universe by adding those homes only increases monetization opportunities for those types of local broadcasters.

“When you take all of our newscasts across all of our metered markets from December 2021 to end of January 2022, our reach among total persons increased by 10%,” says Kevin Stuart, VP, research, Hearst Television, and chairman of NAB’s committee on local television audience measurement (COLTAM). “Our average quarter hour data was up 15% in early morning, and 20%-25% in early evening.”

For other broadcast groups that don’t have top news stations, adding in BBO homes results in a loss of audience. In addition, the sample sizes for those stations are very small, which can distort the data, especially when it comes to demographics.

The possible fix for this is deploying the same technology and methodology with which NBCU and other media companies, such as WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global), are experimenting at the local level. That means using automated content recognition (ACR) solutions, also known as “front of the glass” because smart TVs can record what people are watching according to what’s being projected onto a TV screen’s glass, and possibly combining that data with panels and other data analytics.

As of January 2022, 83% of U.S. homes have at least one connected TV device. “TV households that receive their TV programming through broadband connections now outnumber those that receive their programming through over-the-air antennas (broadcast-only homes),” reported Nielsen in a Feb. 10 release.

Merging ACR data from smart TVs with in-home panel information could be the solution to accurately measuring over-the-air (OTA) viewing in homes using only OTA antennas to capture broadcast signals. On Feb. 22, the Association of National Advertisers said it was asking for requests for proposals from companies that can provide alternatives to Nielsen’s panel, such as TVision, HyphaMetrics and Kantar.

If Nielsen wants to stay in the local TV measurement business, it must make adjustments to its panel, say many of its clients. During the pandemic, the measurement firm announced it had undercounted homes due to being unable to access and monitor its in-home set-top boxes. As a result, the Media Rating Council pulled its accreditation. Clients are seeking more transparency from Nielsen in terms of how the panel is assembled and whom it’s counting.

“I think that there will always be an appetite in the measurement equation for a well-functioning panel,” says Sean Cunningham, Video Advertising Bureau president and CEO. “The ability to count up [all airings of a piece of content across many platforms] is going to take some combination of big data and some form of a panel. What people would like is the ability to do both. What we need are consistently better instruments that are using census-level data to provide the core competency of audience measurement and verification across all platforms.”

The currency problem is not solved, but drastic change is on its way.

“We’re at the beginning of an entirely new measurement era, with real value and real metrics going directly back to the advertisers. Change is coming. We’re leaning into helping to create a unified cross screen view in which advertisers can get a complete view of their advertising performance across screens,” Abcarian says.