Mumbai: Nielsen has announced the release of its enhanced identity system for digital ad ratings in 15 markets starting on 1 February 2022. This change enables more accurate digital ad measurement, connecting digital impressions to the demographics of people across billions of devices in preparation for a cookieless future, it said.

Following the roll out in the UK, Italy, and France on 1 February, the enhanced Nielsen Identity System for digital ad ratings is planned for release in Japan, Australia, India, and Germany on 1 April; Spain, Brazil, Indonesia, and Canada on 1 May; and Singapore, Mexico, Thailand, and Hong Kong on 1 June. Nielsen plans to release the enhanced Identity System across other markets on a monthly cadence following the initial releases in 2022, said the company in a statement.

In addition, Nielsen continues to enter into and expand its relationships with both global and local data providers to power up the Nielsen Identity System. Today the firm has added more than two billion de-duplicated identifiers across markets into the Identity System, growing every day.

“With this enhancement to our Identity System, we are taking another step to assure the longevity of ad measurement amidst the rapidly evolving digital ecosystem," commented Nielsen SVP - product management Sarah Miller. "Because of Nielsen’s unique data assets, we are not only able to adjust and correct licensed third-party user registration data using panels, we have also developed sophisticated machine learning algorithms to cluster digital IDs into people and correct for any possible imbalances from the market’s universe of users. It is this advanced data science methodology fuelled by the sheer volume of Nielsen Identities that will empower the digital ad measurement into the future.”

To combat the issue of cookie and mobile ad id erosion and in preparation for an increasingly fragmented future, Nielsen previously announced the revolution of digital audience measurement by providing holistic people-based measurement across devices, de-duplicating across platforms and publishers.

The Nielsen Identity System serves to unify the identity data that Nielsen receives in an interoperable way across the media ecosystem. Advertisers and publishers can use Nielsen measurement with confidence knowing that when a digital ad is viewed then the measured demographics are appropriately assigned and the audiences are deduplicated across mobile and PC platforms in order to get to true people-based metrics. Nielsen achieves this by uniquely combining Nielsen assets with third-party data sets calibrated against truth sets.

“Nielsen continues to evolve its technologies and methodologies for independent measurement of audiences as the industry itself evolves to utilise cross-media measurement,” said Nielsen’s international chief growth officer and president Sean Cohan. “Nielsen’s strategic measurement approach positions the company to deliver deduplicated audiences across linear and digital as part of Nielsen One.”