Is Nielsen getting a little of its mojo back?
On Monday, Nielsen announced that it has re-earned its accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) for national TV ratings.
The reaccreditation applies to Nielsen’s national ratings only and does not include the company’s local or digital measurement. Nor does it include Nielsen ONE. Just the good ol’ audience panels the industry knows and doesn’t really love.
The timing is fortuitous for Nielsen. TV programmers and agencies willingly turned away from Nielsen when it lost its accreditation in 2021 and pledged to finally begin transacting media against alternative currencies during this upfront season, which is now only weeks away.
But will Nielsen regain the industry’s trust before it’s too late?
A pox on panels
The TV measurement world was upended when Nielsen lost its MRC stamp of approval in September 2021. Programmers complained about Nielsen undercounting their viewership numbers during the peak of the pandemic, which led to the MRC suspending its accreditation of Nielsen’s panel-based ratings for both national and local.
Nielsen’s panel methodology was one of the main reasons for the suspension. You can’t exactly rely on people answering their doors in the middle of a global pandemic.
Nielsen’s very public stumble after a century as the incumbent was a heavy blow. The TV industry used it as an opportunity to voice their displeasure with panels and to embrace a slew of new TV measurement contenders competing to become the industry’s next currency.
In the year and a half since, the industry has whittled down the list of alt currencies to a small handful of favorites. Several broadcasts plan to start transacting media against them.
Still, transforming TV measurement is a slow process, and whether they like it or not, many programmers are still selling most of their media with Nielsen panels.
The road ahead
The reinstatement of Nielsen’s accreditation on the national level means that its core ratings metrics – C3 and C7, which are based on average commercial minutes – may still have some staying power, despite plans to retire them by next year.
But Nielsen still has a lot of work to do to remain relevant in the measurement space. Programmers have already decided that they expect big data and impression-based measurement to inform currencies going forward.
It’s also important to note that Nielsen’s reaccreditation does not include the big data – as in, viewership from set-top boxes and automatic content recognition – that the company is starting to weave into its C3 and C7 metrics.
At this point in the evolution of TV measurement, Nielsen will need to establish that it can provide accurate measurement with big data, not just with panels.
Still, winning back accreditation for its national ratings is a major step in the right direction for Nielsen to prove itself as the competition rises.
