Nielsen Announces Expansion of National Out-of-Home (OOH) Panel

Nielsen has announced that its National TV out-of-home (OOH) panel will be expanded. It will include all TV households in the United States. This project is a significant step toward accurate viewership measurement. It attempts to document out-of-home viewing behaviors for every TV household in the United States.

Nielsen has been capturing OOH viewings for nearly a decade

Nielsen has been recording viewings in public spaces such as restaurants, hotels, bars, and airports for almost ten years. The company has provided metrics for audiences who are not at home, using its own Portable People Meter (PPM) Wearables technology. This allows clients to monitor viewership consumption irrespective of platform, screen, or location. Except for Alaska and Hawaii, Nielsen’s OOH coverage will increase from 65% to 100% by adding more residents to the PPM Wearables footprint.

Nielsen went on to emphasize that gaining access to this viewership is essential for television genres that people frequently watch together. It includes events like sporting events, which are becoming one of the most popular live television programming genres. According to company data, American sports fans watched games from the top five sports leagues for an astounding 1.7 trillion minutes outside of their homes in 2023.

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Streaming TV Consumption Habits and OOH  

As people’s consumption of streaming TV increases – to 36% of total television usage by December 2023, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge, the relevance of measuring live sports and other “appointment” viewing on both linear and streaming platforms grows. There is an increasing need to measure this audience as streaming services get more involved in the live sports market. The impact data from the expanded panel is expected to be delivered by Nielsen in Q4 2024. It happens to fall around Super Bowl LIX. This initiative provides advertisers and broadcasters with insightful data across all viewing environments. Moreover, it marks a significant step towards a more comprehensive understanding of TV viewership. Nielsen is the only measurement company in a position to effectively address the growing demand and competition for limited sports programming.

Here’s what they said

Deirdre Thomas, Chief Product Officer, Audience Measurement at Nielsen said,

Nielsen is highly focused on innovating in order to better serve our clients and ensure our measurement accounts for the full landscape of television consumption. We understand how important it is for our clients to be able to have the most complete picture of the audience, especially for special events like the Super Bowl.

Paul Ballew, chief data and analytics officer of the NFL added,

We are appreciative of Nielsen’s efforts to make out-of-home measurement more complete, providing a much clearer picture of the true audience for all television viewing and especially sports viewership. For years we have been consistent in our belief that major sports events, like the upcoming Super Bowl LVIII, are often viewed with family and friends in large gatherings and this expanded out-of-home viewership will be crucial to measuring those events.

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