Nielsen set to upgrade its TV audience measurement capability

“Currently, buyers and sellers transact on ‘C3’, which provides the average of all commercial minutes within a program,” explained Kim Gilberti, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Nielsen, in response to emailed questions from Variety, the entertainment industry publication.

Measure audience at ‘lower level of granularity’

“As we move to a world where linear television is becoming more addressable, it’s important to be able to post on the individual ads that were served.  Nielsen’s technology advancement gives us the ability to detect and credit tuning events at this lower level of granularity.”

She added: “Over time, we anticipate that buyers and sellers will begin to transact against the individual commercial metrics of a given ad, rather than maintain the current construct of looking at the average of all minutes within a program.”

In its own commentary on the TV rating situation, Variety said Nielsen’s effort would likely set in motion a race with the media companies to see which side can develop a new working system in a timely manner. 

“The networks are trying to build new measurement concepts tailored for modern audience behaviours, while Nielsen already has infrastructure the networks’ owners may not want to invest heavily in to launch. What’s more, both sides will need to have new efforts backed by the Media Rating Council – an industry organisation that sets measurement standards [in the US] – in order to win over sceptical marketing executives at top [TV] advertisers.”