Last week, TV ad buyers experienced the moment they’ve long been waiting for.
Nielsen told ad buyers that it plans to drop panel-only ratings as a standalone currency option later this year. Legacy panel data will only be available in combination with larger data sets as part of a new measurement offering that earned Media Rating Council accreditation just last week.
Big Data + Panel, as the offering is called, is the currency that Nielsen is endorsing for the upcoming upfronts.
Nielsen’s decision signals an inflection point in media measurement that publishers and buyers have both been waiting for. And it’s been a long wait, as noted by several ad executives in various LinkedIn discussions and debates and by marketers speaking to The Wall Street Journal.
“Ending the ability to purchase the panel independent from other data signals is the end of an era, even if that era is ending half a decade later than it needed to,” Jay Friedman, CEO of indie agency Goodway Group, told the WSJ.
Meanwhile, programmers and advertisers are busy testing alternative currencies and new sources of retail data to bring more precision to their campaign measurement.
The alt currency competition
Alt currencies (Comscore, iSpot and VideoAmp) have been gradually gaining market share over the past couple of years.
Roughly 60% of marketers used a Nielsen alternative last year – although many did so in tandem with Nielsen for testing purposes. Of those advertisers, 36% found the alt currency to be more effective than Nielsen, according to Advertiser Perceptions.
Publishers are no longer 100% sold on Nielsen, either. Just this week, TelevisaUnivision and Nielsen got into a spat over a single household that has access to channels from the network’s competitor, Telemundo, but not TelevisaUnivision. The latter argues this discrepancy is negatively affecting its ratings from Nielsen going into the upfront season.
And so some publishers are starting to rely more heavily on Nielsen alternatives. When Paramount’s contract with Nielsen lapsed in the fall, the broadcaster placed its bet on VideoAmp and became the only major TV programmer that isn’t relying on Nielsen in some way. In a memo to clients, Paramount pointed to Nielsen’s unsustainably high costs as the primary reason for not renewing the contract.
It’s also getting too expensive for buyers and sellers to test or use multiple alt currencies at once. Rising costs have been a concern for buyers since the very beginning of the alt currency conversation.
More data, please
In the meantime, while buyers and sellers figure out what to make of the currency wars, they’re turning to shopper and retail data to help with attribution for their CTV campaigns.
Earlier this week, for example, NBCUniversal spoke with AdExchanger about a new partnership with Instacart that gives NBCU’s advertisers access to Instacart shopper data for targeting and attribution. The offering was in a closed beta last year before the companies made it generally available this month.
Other streaming publishers are also offering data solutions that should help brands clean up their approach to measurement. Disney, for instance, unveiled a new product at CES to streamline access to Disney’s measurement and identity partners, including VideoAmp.
In short, programmers continue to woo buyers with closed-loop attribution, particularly as a sweetener during the upfronts.
But it remains to be seen how ad dollars will actually flow when upfront negotiations kick off in just a few months.
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