Mumbai: Nielsen has announced that it will enhance its National television measurement by measuring viewing in a more precise manner, allowing for a future where audience estimates are based on individual ads rather than commercial minutes.
The latest enhancement to Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics will help pave the way for true comparability across the digital and linear platforms and comes following a series of tech, measurement and methodology advancements as Nielsen accelerates its efforts for delivery of Nielsen One, its cross-platform measurement solution, it said on Monday.
With more precise commercial measurement, agencies, advertisers and brands will have the unprecedented ability to directly compare, plan and optimise ad campaign performance over both digital platforms and linear TV.
The announcement comes three months after the company lost the industry approval for its national TV rating service after the board of the US-based Media Rating Council (MRC) suspended its accreditation. The suspension of the decades-old TV rating service followed a long standoff between Nielsen and the networks over the former’s services, including discrepancies in the data shared by the company during the pandemic.
Nielsen said it has also expanded its relationship with Extreme Reach, the global leader in creative logistics, allowing for an efficient way of encoding the vast majority of all national linear TV commercials with Nielsen’s watermarks, which will launch in the first half of 2022.
“We’re very pleased to collaborate with Nielsen on this important step in improving workflow efficiency for marketing teams, which has been at the core of our mission at Extreme Reach for over a decade. Nielsen’s ongoing efforts to embrace the morphing worlds of linear and digital TV now provide a means for marketers and their agencies to understand and value digital and linear TV commercials in a directly comparable way, which is a distinct improvement for the industry,” said Extreme Reach COO Gaurav Agarwal.
Nielsen’s new Individual Commercial Metrics reporting capability will enable the measurement of linear television at a “subminute” level and audience estimates at a level of granularity that is more comparable to digital. Providing comparability in this manner paves the way for Nielsen One to provide something long sought after as an industry imperative—true deduplication across platforms, it said.
“Giving the industry true, trusted metrics that offer harmonisation across platforms is the bedrock to revolutionising the cross-media buying and selling process and a foundational step toward Nielsen ONE,” said Nielsen SVP Product Management Kim Gilberti. “By transforming our TV measurement and moving to Individual Commercial Metrics, both media buyers and sellers will be able to maximise the value of their inventory as well as capitalise and drive return on investment of their advertising spend across the rapidly converging traditional and digital landscapes.”
As a first step in this plan, in early 2022 Nielsen will enhance its process for collecting and crediting watermarks, enabling the detection of watermarks more frequently within a given minute, allowing for credit of shorter duration events, such as individual ads. This change will give sellers the ability to utilise Nielsen’s reporting to properly value their commercial inventory—from pricing to placement.
For the first time, Nielsen’s television measurement will also leverage Gracenote Content Signatures, which will allow for granular crediting for instances where there is no watermark present.
