Nielsen wants to make it easier for media buyers and sellers to tell when multiple viewers are watching something together.
The measurement firm announced on Tuesday that it is piloting a new measurement approach during the Super Bowl. The pilot is designed to more accurately account for co-viewing during the Super Bowl by better incorporating data from its Portable People Meter Wearables, which are wearable devices that Nielsen uses to collect data on individual viewing sessions.
After the Super Bowl, the pilot will continue during big-ticket sports events throughout the first half of the year, including the Daytona 500.
From Nielsen’s perspective, “we think this is a big opportunity to improve person-level measurement” and give buyers and sellers a more accurate picture of who’s actually watching what, said Brian Fuhrer, SVP of product strategy and thought leadership at Nielsen.
Fuhrer said its pilot is a “logical extension” to recent enhancements it has made to its measurement currency offerings – namely, the incorporation of the Advertising Research Foundation’s ARF DASH TV Universe Study, which Nielsen shared with clients last week.
Nielsen’s latest measurement move
Still, with more than 120 million viewers expected to tune into the Big Game this weekend and hundreds of millions of advertising dollars on the line, now seems hardly the right time to tinker with something new.
But Nielsen insists it is not immediately incorporating data from the pilot into its official measurement currency offerings. “We are going to wait to see what the actual impact is before anything happens,” Fuhrer said.
The pilot has “very little downside because it’s not currency,” he said. And, at least at first, “nothing will be transacted off this data.” Instead, Nielsen will make the results of its pilot available to clients in a few weeks as “impact data,” which they can compare with data from Nielsen’s traditional Portable People Meter (PPM) devices within homes that are part of Nielsen’s legacy panel.
Nielsen’s PPM Wearables, which include watches and clips, collect viewing session data without requiring the wearer to log in first – unlike the traditional PPM devices. Removing that layer of user friction should help Nielsen’s devices more accurately measure who’s actually in the room. “The objective of the pilot is switching from a PPM-based algorithm to Wearables” to tell who is watching what, Fuhrer said. Currently, there are 78,000 Wearable devices across the US.
Nielsen’s co-viewing enhancements closely follow its inclusion of additional reference data from the ARF, which “we think gives us a better representation of cable versus over-the-air homes,” Fuhrer said.
Nielsen has been actively addressing gaps in its ad measurement offering since 2021, when it lost accreditation from the Media Rating Council for national and local TV ratings after undercounting viewers. It has since regained accreditation for national ratings, and it also earned accreditation last year for its newest measurement product that combines its legacy audience panels with more precise data sets. The offering, called Big Data + Panel, has TV viewing data from broadcasters and streaming distributors, such as Roku, Comcast, Vizio and DirecTV, among others.
And Nielsen says it isn’t stopping here. It has more co-viewing enhancements planned for this year, although it declined to share specifics.
First, it remains to be seen whether buyers and sellers are satisfied with Nielsen’s upcoming pilot.
