Nielsen‘s TV-industry measurement stick has regained some of its edge after an industry monitor restored accreditation to the company’s national TV ratings.
The Media Rating Council, which holds measurement organizations to standards on behalf of the media sector, said Monday that Nielsen had regained approval after working to rectify several issues. Nielsen’s national ratings, arguably the standard in tabulating TV audiences, have been without industry backing since September of 2021, after TV networks complained that Nielsen’s work measuring activity during the coronavirus pandemic was sub-standard.
Nielsen’s “commitments to validate and improve its estimates of the level of Broadband-only Households” and to “enhancing the disclosures it provides to users about the variability associated with its estimates of television viewing” were “especially critical to our decision to re-apply accreditation at this time,” said George Ivie, executive director and CEO of the Media Rating Council, in a prepared statement.
Nielsen still has work to do. Its local TV ratings, which also lost accreditation, have not regained it. And the measurement company continues to work on a range of new audience-measurement technologies that also require MRC approval. One of those is Nielsen One, a system Nielsen has already started to implement to monitor audience activity across a broad range of media venues.
The TV networks, which have long expressed dissatisfaction with Nielsen’s ability to upgrade its technology to take on the behaviors of audiences using broadband and mobile video alongside traditional TV, have used the company’s lack of accreditation to explore other systems of counting viewers, setting up new and well-funded competition.
Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount, TelevisaUnivision, and Warner Bros. Discovery have launched a joint industry committee they intend to use to vet and certify a dizzying array of audience-measurement technologies that have come to market in recent months. The media companies are working with Open AP, the industry consortium that has in the past been used to create standard definitions of audience segments that can be used by advertisers, no matter the media company with which they transact. Many of the companies have also struck partnerships with a new phalanx of measurement vendors including iSpot, VideoAmp and Comscore. Warner Bros Discovery said in March that it intended to use the two latter companies in helping it determine currencies in the 2023 upfront.
