AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT

Nielsen launches cross-platform measurement product for new TV era

By our News Team | 2023

Service aims to provide a more comprehensive snapshot of consumer TV viewing habits that have changed rapidly in recent years.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the traditional TV ratings system set the agenda for where marketers and their agencies spent their TV budgets. Programmes and channels with poor ratings were consigned to the scrapheap, based on a system developed by AC Nielsen in the 1950s for the US market.

But in recent years that approach has become unfit for purpose as more people consume video content and programming in ways undreamed of a decade ago. Conventional viewing has given way to connected TV, desktop TV, mobile TV and streaming services (ad-supported or otherwise) such as Netflix and Amazon.

Photo by Cottonbro Studio from Pexels

With this in mind, Nielsen this week launched Nielsen One Ads, which promises to provide advertisers with a cross-platform measurement product of audiences on a second-by-second basis, versus the industry’s usual minute-by-minute standard.

“The offering represents an ambitious bid by Nielsen to evolve its measurement capabilities for the streaming era and arrives as the firm’s traditional ratings system comes under fire,” observes the industry news website, Marketing Dive.

“The new solution is positioned around giving brands and publishers a better understanding of reach and frequency across screens, while being speedier than legacy models. Nielsen One Ads will have ‘always on’ metrics for digital campaigns and plans to provide analysis for linear TV second-by-second, breaking from the lag typically associated with measuring [a] channel.

New service launched in US on Wednesday

Nielsen One Ads launched yesterday (Wednesday, 11 January) and is initially only available in the US market.

“Audiences today control what they watch, when they watch and how they watch it. As the media landscape becomes more varied and complicated, Nielsen is committed to working with the industry to bring clarity and simplicity to media buying and selling through Nielsen One,” said Karthik Rao, Chief Executive Officer for Audience Measurement at Nielsen.

“By combining the scale of big data and granular insights from our people-based panel, Nielsen One provides comprehensive, representative measurement of ads and content for our clients to transact with confidence.”

According to a Nielsen, during 2023 the new service will evolve to include advanced audience and outcomes measurement to support a campaign from end-to-end.

This will provide a view of the audience at each step of the media journey – from the audience who saw an ad campaign, to how the campaign was delivered to niche audiences, and the actions those audiences took as a result of seeing the campaign.

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