It’s a weird time to be a TV advertiser.
Until roughly two years ago (and despite dissatisfied grumblings among most broadcasters), Nielsen was pretty much the only show in town when it came to TV measurement.
Now, panels feel passé, programmers are actively testing alternative currencies, a joint industry committee of competing broadcasters is working together on standards for cross-platform measurement – and Nielsen, once the last word in TV currency, is on its back foot.
Life comes at you fast.
But there’s still a long way to go before TV measurement is a solved problem – if it ever even is, said Dan Aversano, SVP of data, analytics and advanced advertising at TelevisaUnivision, speaking at a Cynopsis event in New York earlier this week.
“Don’t discount how slowly we move as an industry,” Aversano said. “Whether we like it or not, there’s a reality to that.”
A tough row to hoe
Although turning a big ship takes time, there is an appetite for innovation on both the buy and sell sides.
Advertisers are embracing programmatic buying, including at the upfronts, and large broadcasters are making progress with their alt currency pilots. NBCU, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount are all testing Nielsen alternatives.
And it’s been a long time since there was this much movement in the TV measurement space.
“We haven’t had real change in measurement or currency – I can’t even remember when it was,” quipped Stacey Stewart, US chief marketing officer at UM Worldwide. “I think it was the C3 metric in the early 2000s.”
C3 is a panel-based transactional metric Nielsen launched in 2007 to measure the average viewership for both live commercials and time shifted and on-demand viewing over the course of three days after a linear broadcast.
In late 2020, Nielsen announced plans to replace C3 and C7, which measures average commercial viewership over the course of a week, by the second half of 2024 with Nielsen One, its new cross-media measurement solution.
But, to Aversano’s point, the mills of the gods (or, in this case, the incumbents) do grind slowly.
‘Putting all this sh*t together’
For example, despite announcing that it would release a currency combining both big data and traditional panel measurement in time for this year’s upfronts, Nielsen backtracked with just a few weeks to spare before upfront negotiations began last month.
Although Nielsen did recently regain its Media Rating Council accreditation for national TV ratings, which it lost as a result of undercounting viewership during the pandemic, its reaccreditation doesn’t cover big data like automatic content recognition (ACR) and viewership from set-top boxes. (Not that the JIC is prioritizing accreditation … )
Some entities, including the Video Advertising Bureau, believe Nielsen’s delay will slow down the company’s progress on Nielsen One (which Nielsen denies).
Meanwhile, Nielsen launched a data clean room with Snowflake this week to share first-party data with clients.
While all this drama plays out, it’s up to buyers and broadcasters to test new metrics and currencies to see what works and learn from what doesn’t.
“You don’t want to settle on one thing too quickly,” Stewart said. “You want to make sure that the direction you’re heading in is futureproof and scalable and that you’re growing with the landscape as it changes.”
It’s also important to realize there isn’t going to be one single resolution to the measurement debate. The TV market will most likely end up with a hybrid model that includes everything from ACR and big data via smart TVs to, yes, much-maligned Nielsen-style panels.
“Call me a dinosaur, but panels serve a purpose,” Aversano said. “It’s putting all this shit together that’s going to solve this problem.”
