Nielsen Leverages Online, TV Metrics
- by Wayne Friedman , October 1, 2012
Getting closer to delivering the holistic media measurement marketers want, Nielsen says it is leveraging its new online measurement service with its
TV-based service cross-platform service.
The two services: The Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, which has accreditation from the Media Ratings Council, and national TV-based Nielsen
Cross-Platform Campaign ratings. The new product is available today.
"This is the first time we can show the number of people who saw a campaign no matter where they lived," stated Steve
Hasker, Nielsen's president of global media products and advertiser solution.
The Cross-Platform Campaign ratings provides unduplicated and incremental reach, frequency and GRP measures
for TV and Internet advertising. Clients like ESPN, Facebook, GroupM, Hulu and Unilever are among the dozen companies that have signed on.
Nielsen has signed on a number of ad networks
and Internet technology companies for its Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) recently, including the CW network, which has been looking for specific measurement, since many of its TV shows run online. The
OCR service will allow the CW to provide audience guarantees to advertisers.
While both Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings and Nielsen's longtime TV-based National People Meter service
have received Media Rating Council accreditation, Nielsen's Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings is currently still under review by the organization.
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This effort confuses me - looks to be Nielsen responding to what agencies and clients WANT even if it's inaccurate and mis-leading. Online stats are in no way comparable to TV stats - they measure entirely different things and have far different reality when it comes to estimating true impact. Even though many want to make their own lives easier, holistic only matters if there's truth still in it.
Sorry Doug - have to totally disagree with your comment that "online stats are in no way comparable to TV stats". The whole goal of advertising is to impact PEOPLE - whether they be impacted online or on television. In the above article, both systems report on people, so how is this wrong? I agree that online publishers have made merry over the past 15 years or so, with their own metrics which in many cases are totally unbelievable and impossible (e.g. Monthly Unique Browsers - they got to around 120 million here in Australia in a country of 22 million people). What the ratings do NOT measure - and neither should they - is sales impact. They measure an Opportunity-To-See an advertisement. The simple reason is that the publisher/broadcaster has zero control over the ad content, so they report on the vehicle (and context) that the ad content is carried in. Online last-click attribution models are at best naive approximations of communications plans simply because they look at online in isolation. Non-linear econometric models that incorporate ALL media used in the communications plan - along with pricing, distribution, (also for competitor brands), macro-economic data, and seasonality factors - are the closest we have to working out what REALLY works.
I think this is a step in the right direction. Many shows have been cancelled due to low TV ratings...but they were very popular with the online viewing crowd. With all the new technology - Nielsen needed a way to not be outdated. They need a way to count all viewers and this is a good start.
My question is why is Nielsen or comScore not required to provide error rates at the campaign measurement leve. These are projection models. During this election year you will see many polls form Gallop and you will always see a + or - error rate. This should go for TV as well. Then you can select the correct audience to do a media mix model based on a comparative GRP. I do think this is the right direction but bring back the basic science to measurement.
Here's the online challenge: How does one "something" compare with one impression? In our judging impact from various TV ads & online campaigns, in most cases it's worth about 10 to 100 times less. So are we able to understand what we really have from a holistic integration? Not so much.
Good question Daryl. I think the answer is purely pragmatic (full disclosure - I used to work for Nielsen here in Australia up until 1995). In the Australian market across our metropolitan, regional and subscription TV markets we receive around 3.5 million ratings data points a day. Yes, 3.5 million a day (there are other averages over time that we also receive). Buyers struggle to execute buys in such a fragmented market let alone assess or calculate Std. error rates. We do have access to an online Sampling Variance calculator, but I bet few if any would use it apart from during dispute resolutions. The measurement science is all there, but few have the time to use it, as well as the statistical knowledge to discuss the subtelties of using such metrics at a spot or campaign level.