Nielsen has entered into an open marriage with three viewability providers.
The company will now support Integral Ad Science, Moat and DoubleVerify within its digital audience measurement solution, Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings.
Although it had a preexisting relationship with Integral Ad Science since 2012, clients have requested support for alternative providers that fit their preferences.
“We’re trying to offer a market-wide measurement option using our standard currency tool, so this was a logical step to provide more flexibility,” said David Wong, SVP of digital product leadership for Nielsen. “Buyers and sellers qualify viewability using different criteria, so [we’re working] with these partners because we needed to offer that choice.”
Wong said certain viewability vendors are stronger in certain capacities, such as mobile, and Nielsen wanted to integrate with such platforms for mobile-heavy clients.
Nielsen claims its audience measurement solution enabled mobile measurement since the summer of 2014, around the time it changed the name of Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings to Digital Ad Ratings to reflect its multichannel efforts.
With its latest move, Nielsen also wants to cut down on latency issues, so Nielsen DAR will now run a single, standardized measurement tag that plugs into all of the noted viewability vendors.
Conversely, all programmatic platforms that use Nielsen DAR can also implement a single measurement tag instead of working through complex integrations for each viewability provider, Wong said.
“This is a way for Nielsen to…remove a bit of that pain of using multiple layers of vendors,” he added.
Nielsen has more to do on the viewability front. In order for a viewable impression standard to take hold, viewability and audience measurement still need to come together.
The company’s pursuit of this goal involves partnerships with major digital media players as well as vendors. To that end, Nielsen has lately struck deals with Snapchat for digital audience measurement and Facebook for ad viewability verification.
“I’d say our objective is to provide viewable GRPs – human, fraud-free and demographic measurements across the entire marketplace,” Wong said. “The way that we do that may vary from publisher to publisher, but with Facebook, that is a case where we are working to offer that human, viewable, fraud-free demographic GRP through more of a direct integration.”
