For next months Winter Olympics, NBCU will be evaluating the audience data from iSpot.TV along with … [+]
With Nielsen under fire and the TV advertising upfronts only a few months away, several prominent content providers have announced partnerships with alternative audience measurement companies and partnering with ad agencies to evaluate the results. Billie Gold, a media research specialist notes, “The measurement solution gates were thrown wide open when Nielsen lost MRC accreditation, however it remains to be seen if any one of the companies vying for a piece of the currency pie (currently all not fully accredited) can be a one size fits all solution for advertisers.”
Citing the need for audience measurement independence, last August NBCU issued 54 RFPs to ad tech companies and wound up with over 100 responses. This month, NBCU reached a multi-year agreement with iSpot.TV as an audience measurement provider, this extends an existing relationship begun in 2014. NBCU said they would be undergoing a “test and learn” process with iSpot.TV. The test will include next month’s Winter Olympics from Beijing and Super Bowl LVI. It was also announced that media holding company Publicis will invite some clients to participate in the test. NBCU is also seeking new audience measurement tools for the 2022-23 upfront negotiations which will typically start in the late Spring. NBCU plans on using audience data from iSpot.TV in helping to determine advertising rates.
iSpot.TV is the latest and one of many audience measurement providers NBCU has used to evaluate and compare to Nielsen. For example, in 2008 when Beijing had hosted the Summer Games, NBCU introduced the “million-dollar research lab” (as then research head Alan Wurtzel quipped, the billion dollars was the cost for the rights fees to televise the Olympics, not the price of the research). Also, for the 2006 upfront negotiations, NBCU, partnering with IAG Research, made audience guarantees for Toyota based on viewer engagement instead of ratings.
In the 2018 Winter Olympics from PyeongChang, South Korea generated $920 million in national ad sales for NBCU. Last year’s delayed Tokyo Games earned a reported $1.25 billion in ad dollars. For this year’s Super Bowl, occurring during the Olympics, a reported :30 ad will cost marketers a record high $6.5 million. Both high-profile sporting events will be streamed in their entirety on Peacock. Lastly, during the 2021 upfront and using ratings data primarily from Nielsen, NBCU, in a strong marketplace, had garnered over $7 billion in ad commitments.
One of the issues NBCU and other networks have been having with Nielsen is lower ratings. For example, the Tokyo Olympics averaged 15.6 million primetime viewers, the lowest average audience in decades. Last year’s Super Bowl on CBS averaged 96.4 million viewers, including a record high 5.7 million who streamed the game. Nonetheless, the audience was a decline from 102 million viewers the previous year and the lowest TV household rating (38.2) since 1969. For the 2020-21 broadcast season, NBC reported a decline in primetime audiences of 18%.
NBC along with other broadcast and cable networks cited Nielsen’s inability to bolster their nationwide People Meter panel during COVID for the sharp drop-off in viewership. At issue was Nielsen’s inability to enter panelists’ households during the lockdown resulting in a smaller People Meter sample causing a declining ratings and ad revenue.
For audience measurement, iSpot.TV say they use data from automated content recognition (ACR) available from web enhanced “Smart TVs.” iSpot.TV can measure audiences for streaming video as well as linear and time shifted television on a second-by-second basis and in “real-time.” It was announced iSpot.TV will provide next day measurement including ad impressions, incremental reach/frequency and any deduplication with television and streaming audiences. Additionally, iSpot.TV says it will provide outcome-based data such as website traffic and product purchasing. iSpot.TV is reportedly pursuing accreditation from the MRC.
Earlier in the month WarnerMedia announced they were partnering with iSpot.TV, VideoAmp and Comscore
Last September, ViacomCBS and VideoAmp announced a partnership with the objective to provide an alternative to Nielsen. VideoAmp will be guaranteeing audiences of media schedules for ViacomCBS’ hyper-targeted and advanced advertising platform Vantage.
Furthermore, according to Adweek, during the first quarter ViacomCBS and media holding company Dentsu will be conducting a pilot test using VIdeoAmp and Open APs newly launched XPm. This will enable cross-platform measurement across various screens for advertisers and media companies. The test will include several Dentsu clients in a number of product categories. Launched in 2017 OpenAP is an advanced audience platform used for data driven and targeted ad buys across a number of TV networks. OpenAP members include AMC Networks
Dentsu is also one of several media holding companies including Publicis, Havas, Omnicom
In November, Univision announced they would be using Comscore data for three newly acquired local TV stations. Effective January 1, Univision will rely exclusively on Comscore for local TV measurement and advanced (beyond demographic) audiences in Orlando, Tampa and Washington, DC. Previously, Comscore, has had success in competing with Nielsen in measuring local TV audiences in smaller markets that had been reliant on diaries. All three Univision stations however, are in major markets and measured by Nielsen via Local People Meters.
Comscore is one of a handful of measurement companies that can provide cross-platform analytics for local markets. Comscore uses data from cable set-top boxes and smart TVs and is the largest Nielsen competitor with over 3,000 clients including local TV station groups, networks, advertisers and ad agencies.
With all these recent announcements, Nielsen has not been idle. In December Nielsen announced an agreement with Disney
There are several criteria these Nielsen competitors will be facing to become successful. They include affordable pricing, reliability (minimal software glitches), strong client service and an easy-to-use interface. In addition, to undergo an MRC audit and gain accreditation all these measurement companies will need to be completely transparent in how they measure cross-platform, incremental reach & frequency, deduplication and business outcomes among their other services.
For several years the advertising and media community have chafed at Nielsen’s lethargy in measuring audiences as, most notably, younger viewers migrated away from television, toward streaming video and were not being counted. Moving forward, with the emergence of new audience measurement companies relying on large datasets, the networks and their advertising clients will be required to spend time and money in evaluating their services and providing the industry with their findings.
Time will tell whether this is a negotiating ploy to force Nielsen to speed up their cross-platform measurement which is still two years away (a long-time in the fast-paced advertising industry) or, after years of being the only ratings provider around, will they begin to face formidable competition.
Billie Gold says, “With new measurement providers it comes down to whose media cocktail is the most accurate? If we compare one to another, would they yield similar results? Or would they yield wildly among each measurement provider based on their proprietary targeting metrics. It’s the wild west out there.”
Mitch Oscar, Director Advanced TV Strategy, USIM notes, “Since 2016, the major TV network groups have invested significant resources to marry their portfolio content (TV, digital and advanced TV) and data infusion (behavioral characteristics and attribution) to enhance the consumer’s ad viewing experience and drive better ad performance for marketers. As part of the value proposition, the network’s advanced TV sales units – A&E Precision (“& Performance” circa 2020-ish), Discovery Engage, Disney’s Luminate, Fox Next (formerly AIM), NBCU AdSmart (formerly Audience Studio) Turner Ignite (now defunct), and Viacom Vantage – offer marketers “alternative currencies” to compare campaign performance by tracking traditional Nielsen age and gender analysis versus new behavioral targeted and outcome delivery.
Although 100+ data sources were sighted in self-reported collateral shared by these sales entities since their inauguration, Nielsen still is the dominant measurer and reporter of campaign viewership. Hopefully, with the spate of recent announcements from the TV network groups and “data-ists” offering solutions for cross platform/device measurement (reach extension and deduplication, frequency management), individual impression delivery versus reliance on panel modeling, and ultimately product movement or awareness, companies such as 605, Comscore, iSpot.tv, TVSquared and VideoAmp will glean the support necessary to move from aggrandizement to the heavy lifting – sales lifting that is.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2022/01/20/networks-and-advertisers-are-looking-to-replace-nielsen/