Roku’s streaming data will now be integrated into Nielsen’s campaign measurement and outcome tools, the two companies announced on Monday, giving advertisers a better view into what audiences are watching across Roku devices.
As part of a new multi-year agreement, Nielsen will continue to use Roku’s TV data in its Big Data + Panel offering for both linear and streaming ratings.
Additionally, Roku will now get access to those streaming ratings from Nielsen. According to Sarah Harms, Roku’s VP of advertising, marketing and measurement, this will allow the media company greater visibility into how they compare against other operations systems and other publishers.
Meanwhile, Nielsen’s advertiser clients will be able to better measure their specific audience reach on Roku, as well as any of the third-party apps and platforms that exist on Roku’s operating system.
Time for an update
Roku and Nielsen have worked together for a full decade at this point. Their original agreement allowed Nielsen to measure video advertising on Roku TV devices. Roku later became the first OTT platform to offer audience guarantees based on Nielsen’s digital ad ratings (DAR) product, and even acquired Nielsen’s advanced video advertising business in 2021.
But even the most solid partnerships need updating every once in a while.
TV viewership is much more fragmented now than it was when both companies first began teaming up, said Ameneh Atai, general manager for digital audience membership at Nielsen. That, plus the increased pressure on marketers to prove their own value, is what led to a great focus on audience and outcome measurement for this particular integration.
Roku’s large presence in the CTV industry certainly sweetens the pot, too. According to Nielsen, streaming on Roku devices makes up 21% of all TV viewing time, and The Roku Channel is the No. 2 streaming app as far as ad-supposed TV time goes.
Where Roku overlaps with either first-party streaming partners, Nielsen can use its own identity graph to deduplicate the data and ensure correct attribution within its measurement tools.
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“It always comes back to, what does the advertiser need? Who did they pay?” said Atai.
More importantly for Roku, Nielsen’s tools make a distinction between TV time and ad-supported TV time, which gives both advertisers and publishers a better sense of how their advertising is playing to audiences.
“Don’t sleep on ad supported data,” said Harms.
