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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Nielsen Announces Nielsen One Ads For Cross-Screen Measurement
Nielsen announced that Nielsen ONE Ads, phase one of its cross-screen measurement platform, Nielsen One. It will initially be available in the U.S. starting January 11.
Amidst a growing market of new alternative TV and media “currencies,” Nielsen is finally hitting the ad campaign trail. The measurement and data giant says Nielsen ONE Ads is the latest innovation in measurement, providing a consistent, comparable, and deduplicated view of ads across screens -linear TV, connected TV, desktop, or mobile.
Nielsen ONE Ads Measurement Offering
It’s critical for media buyers and sellers to understand their audiences and how to reach them. Nielsen ONE Ads will allow publishers to show the strength of their platforms and buyers of media to find the most efficient and effective places to advertise to reach the right audiences.
In addition to its standard metrics across platforms, Nielsen ONE Ads will introduce impact data for more granular linear television measurement. It will provide measurement at the second level rather than the industry standard of minute-level audiences. However, the impact data is for research purposes and is not available for buying or selling. This will provide the industry with greater comparability across linear and digital platforms. Kimberly Gilberti, SVP, of product management, Nielsen explained,
Ultimately, Nielsen One will allow advertisers and publishers to plan and transact on a single set of metrics across linear and digital. And those metrics are reliable, independent, standardized across the industry and across all of those different platforms.
Furthermore, Nielsen plans to calibrate big data sets from set-top boxes, smart TVs, and third parties using its people-based audience panel. Keeping up with TV panels’ evolving role from a monitoring tool to a data-verification tool.
Nielsen ONE Ads dashboard will aid advertisers to comprehend the deduped audience reach, and frequency counts across screens by campaigns. So, it will leverage Nielsen ONE’s proprietary ID system as well as data from Nielsen’s panels. Further, direct publisher integrations, across walled gardens will provide an understanding of persons-level campaign impressions.
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Nielsen One Content – work in progress
Nielsen also introduced Nielsen ONE Content which provides a more aggregate view of campaign performance across devices. It remains in alpha but will be available later this year. It provides cross-platform, deduplicated, and syndicated content metrics across devices, delivering a clearly contextualized view of aggregated program performance across distribution platforms.
As the competition is fierce, Nielsen will need to keep adding features to ONE. The measurement and data giant aims to bridge current measurement capabilities, both linear and digital, into a single system with Nielsen ONE Ads and Content.
In late 2021, Nielsen lost its accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) for local and national TV ratings. The suspension continued with MRC voting in November 2022. As a result, Nielsen ONE serves as the cornerstone of Nielsen’s strategy in the face of alternative measurement currency providers. In the wake of Nielsen’s measurement difficulties, more competitors have stepped into the spotlight offering new currencies including NBC Universal, iSpot VideoAmp, and others. Karthik Rao, Chief Executive Officer, Audience Measurement, Nielsen said,
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.
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Nielsen Introduces Nielsen Identity System for Digital Ad Ratings in India
Nielsen has announced the launch of its Nielsen Identity System in India. The company will enhance its open web methodology in India for digital ad ratings through the identity system alongside seven other markets: Germany, Australia, Japan, Spain, Indonesia, Canada, and Brazil.
How will the Nielsen Identity System help advertisers in India?
The India launch of the Nielsen Identity System follows the successful launches in Italy, France, and the UK last year. Through this, advertisers and publishers are able to measure the reach and frequency of their audiences, by removing demographic data duplication across mobile and PC platforms, allowing them to track accurate people-based metrics when a digital advert is viewed. Using both Nielsen’s and third-party providers’ data, the system will link digital ad impressions on the open web with Indian demographic data.
In India, it is powered by more than 700 million device identifiers in a privacy-centric manner. Nielsen will continue to work and expand its relationship with global and local data providers to increase coverage within the Nielsen Identity System. In addition to Nielsen’s unique data assets, and advanced machine learning models, these strategic relationships make Nielsen a leader in digital ad measurement in India and globally.
The company will introduce the identity system in Singapore, Mexico, Thailand, The Philippines, and Hong Kong in May. This launch is one of many steps in the company’s global Nielsen ONE strategy, the future of cross-media measurement.
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And that’s what they said
Dolly Jha, Nielsen India’s Managing Director said,
We’re leading the way in tackling digital consumer behaviour fragmentation. From granularity, to large-scale measurement, we’re delivering actionable insights to help advertisers measure, manage and optimise their campaign budgets and results.
Sarah Miller, SVP, of product management, at Nielsen said,
With this enhancement to our Identity System we are taking another step to assure the continuity of ad measurement amidst the rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.
Because of Nielsen’s unique data assets, we are not only able to adjust and correct licensed third party demographic data using panels, we have also developed sophisticated machine learning algorithms to cluster digital identifiers into people and correct for any possible imbalances from the market’s universe of users. It is this advanced data science methodology fueled by the sheer volume of Nielsen Identities that will empower the digital ad measurement into the future.
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Is Measurement Giant Nielsen $16Bn Buyout A Hope For Turnaround?
The 99-year-old TV rating giant, Nielsen announced that it has agreed to be acquired by private equity.
Why we care
This deal enables Nielsen to continue its transition from linear to digital media measurement without the intense scrutiny of the private markets. Nielsen and the consortium began negotiating earlier this month. Nielsen rejected the combined offer of $9 billion, raising the bid to $16 billion to get the deal done.
Details: The PE consortium is headed by Evergreen Coast Capital Corp, an affiliate of activist investor Elliott Investment Management, and Brookfield Business Partners. It is buying Nielsen for $28 per share or $16 billion in an all-cash transaction, including the assumption of debt.
- The statement said the company’s Board of Directors voted unanimously to support the acquisition proposal, which is a 10% premium over the Consortium’s previous proposal.
- Even though Nielsen must invest in innovation, it also needs to make money on these acquisitions so that stockholders can receive a 60% premium over Nielsen’s share price before market speculation over the potential transaction.
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The bigger picture
The PE is not acting as a ‘white knight’ to Nielsen by giving it capital. Industry experts suggest the consortium could take a cue from the PE playbook as the goal is to create a more streamlined entity focused on its strong point “panel-based ratings.”
- However, to preserve Nielsen’s dominance, the new owners would require to face the pressure of additional investments or aggressive pricing which may eat the profits, at least for the short term. They could invest in continuing the new platform ‘Nielsen One’ (which is in the midst of the testing phase), which aims to measure audiences as they watch programming in both a linear and digital manner, something that the industry has long desired. Also, possibly try again to obtain Media Rating Council accreditation.
- Yet, time is ticking. Nielsen is under unprecedented pressure to modernize its media measurement capabilities as new firms launch to threaten its market share. Not to mention this year’s upfronts are right around the corner, and many of the largest programmers, including NBCU, and Warner Media have already signed for alternate measurement providers to give marketers the cross-platform currency and transparency they want.
- Nielsen would need to make a “clear message” about the capabilities of its unified platform ahead of the upfronts in order to maintain its competitive edge – and that’s unlikely to occur soon
- Thus, the reinvention of Nielsen at this stage is a somewhat dubious proposition. Hence, to profit -from this deal, it seems likely that the new owners will ride Nielsen’s “cash cow business” ( panel ratings) and sell off its (if any) technology. Presently, the future of Nielsen seems undetermined but industry experts believe the acquisition will create more competition.
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That’s what they said
Jesse Cohn, a managing partner, and Marc Steinberg, a senior portfolio manager, on behalf of Evergreen and Elliott, said in a statement,
After months of deep market analysis, industry diligence and management reviews, we are firmly convinced that Nielsen will continue to be the gold standard for audience measurement as it executes on the Nielsen ONE roadmap. Having first invested in Nielsen nearly four years ago, we have a unique appreciation for the Company’s ongoing relevance to the global, digital-first media ecosystem. Today’s outcome represents a significant win for Nielsen’s shareholders and for the business itself, as our multibillion-dollar investment will help Nielsen reinforce its transformation at this critical inflection point.
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