Nielsen Says Total Audience Measurement Is Coming ‘by the End of the Year’

Company creating a common metric for TV and digital

Nielsen will finally track the viewership of shows like The Big Bang Theory across all platforms. Image: CBS

Like winter on Game of Thrones, total audience measurement is coming—and soon. That was Nielsen’s mantra during the company’s “Measuring the Total Audience” seminar Monday at Advertising Week.

“By the end of this year, we’ll have most of these pieces in place,” said Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s global president, referring to the firm’s total audience measurement, which he said will provide a total audience read across all linear and digital platforms daily. The new data, he added, will give advertisers, buyers and networks “the ammunition to move beyond C3 and C7” when it comes to advertising metrics.

Nielsen’s total audience measurement is “trying to create a level playing field between television and digital video,” with “like-for-like metrics,” said Lynda Clarizio, president of U.S. media for Nielsen.  “We want the same numbers to be out there.”

Clarizio explained that Nielsen ratings are based on the “average minute audience,” while digital video metrics are expressed in terms of views. The apples-to-oranges comparison was illustrated by ESPN’s 2014 World Cup ratings. The World Cup averaged 4.6 million viewers on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, while the digital stream was “viewed” by 115 million, which seems to be more than 20 times the linear audience. But the average minute audience—i.e. the same metric used on the linear side—was just 307,000.

As part of what Nielsen will call its Total Content Ratings, “we’re going to put all those metrics out there” and let networks and advertisers decide which ones are best to use, said Clarizio. “It’s not up to us to determine the currency.”

But what’s been taking Nielsen so long? “It’s complex,” said Clarizio. “To measure across all these different devices and platforms requires all these different methodologies.”

The metrics should also “allow for a calmer marketplace” in the SVOD space, as rights owners are currently flying blind with regards to how popular their shows are on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, said Hasker.

The Total Content Ratings will also include SVOD offerings like Netflix, even though Netflix has stripped out the Nielsen watermark from its content in a effort to prevent the company from measuring its data. Instead, Nielsen is using a “signature-based methodology,” said Clarizio, but hopes that programmers who sell their content to Netflix and other SVOD platforms will “insist that that Nielsen watermark is embedded in the content when it’s distributed, because that’s the easiest way for us to measure it.”

Netflix’s secrecy when it comes to ratings metrics “highlights the need for the industry to work together to create this measurement ecosystem,” said Clarizio. “We do wish that Netflix were being more cooperative. They have their reasons not to be, but as we come to one content ecosystem, we hope that one day they do cooperate.” …

… read on at adweek.com

Originally posted by Jason Lynch at Adweek
28th September 2015