Nielsen Trying To Claw Back Ratings Credibility, Gets MRC Accreditation

In a huge win for Nielsen Holdings PLC, once considered the gold standard for television ratings until the media industry’s measurement watchdog, the Media Rating Council, or MRC, suspended its accreditation in 2021, the MRC reversed course on Monday and voted to restore accreditation.

The MRC is a neutral, independent industry watchdog which was created following a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice following a Congressional Oversight review into audience measurement.

Nielsen is not out of the woods yet—many major media companies have already signed contracts with competing services and are using software in-house which have various datapoints from outside sources as well as internal data. This will, at the very least, leave Nielsen with less pricing leverage than they have had in the past.

Pandemic-related undercounting of viewers due to their inability to visit panel homes in person had a significant impact on Nielsen getting an accurate count, and many ratings services—including Nielsen—have been supplementing data from consumers with set-top boxes from cable and satellite providers.

However, gauging the audience for content viewed outside of traditional multichannel operators has continued to be a struggle. George Ivie, executive director and CEO of the MRC, said the vote to restore accreditation was not unanimous. “…There is still more work to be done both in the near and long term to ensure Nielsen’s [National Television Audience Measurement Services] continue to meet our standards and the requirements of the industry,” he said. He noted the MRC has not yet reinstated Nielsen’s local-market TV measurement.

Notably, the MRC did not accredit its multi-platform measurement system dubbed Nielsen One, which the company is planning on replacing its current system with. So time is of the essence to get advertisers and the MRC on board with Nielsen One.

The MRC executive committee includes high-profile executives from major advertising and media companies which will need to work hard with Nielsen to get a good feeling about the quality of the data being provided with Nielsen One. The MRC also has not accredited Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings.

Among the items the MRC wants Nielsen to work on are improving on the way Nielsen incorporates set-top box and data from smart TVs to demonstrate compliance and transparency. The MRC also wants Nielsen to improve its estimates of broadband-only households.

“As the industry demand measurement that is trusted, independent and founded on real viewing from real people, we continue to support the MRC guidelines that set the standard for quality, audited measurement,” said Karthik Rao, CEO, Audience Measurement at Nielsen.

Just as important, however, is getting key executives at the major media companies on board again with Nielsen. Very vocal negative comments about the accuracy of Nielsens ratings data helped spur the MRC into suspending Nielsen’s accreditation.

One of the most vocal of which was from NBCUniversal chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships Linda Yaccarino, who has been publicly criticizing the quality of the ratings data way before the COVID pandemic hit.

In 2016, speaking on a Variety Entertainment Summit panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, she said, “Imagine you’re a quarterback, and every time you threw a touchdown, it was only four points instead of six. That’s basically what I’m dealing with every friggin’ day.” And that was just the opening salvo, she openly criticized Nielsen for years, convincing some of her colleagues to get on board with calling Nielsen data out as lacking in the media.

A number of competitors such as Comscore
SCOR
(formerly Rentrak), iSpot and VideoAmp came out as possible alternatives to Nielsen. However, none of these companies are accredited with the MRC.

In addition to its problems of linear ratings inaccuracy, Nielsen also faced criticism of its digital ratings after NexTV complained that Nielsen’s Weekly Streaming Top 10 report showed conspicuously low numbers for the film “Don’t Look Up” given that Netflix
NFLX
itself had been touting that the film broke viewership records. Nielsen later admitted that a number of programs, including “Don’t Look Up,” had been under-credited, admitting that viewership for its premiere week were three times what it had originally reported.

Nielsen was previously a publicly traded company but agreed in March of 2022 to be acquired by a number of private-equity firms led by Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation, an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management L.P., and Brookfield Business Partners L.P., together with institutional investors in a $16 billion deal. The transaction closed in October of last year.