Nielsen will ultimately come to dominate the field of streaming media audience measurement, much the way it has for television, and is claiming to do for online display advertising now, CEO David Calhoun said. He made his prediction during the media and marketing research giant’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2012 earnings call.
In response to a question from a Wall Street analyst, Calhoun said the revenues Nielsen derives from measuring streaming media audiences will be “incremental” to what it generates from measuring the rest of online media.
The main obstacles are not technological but industrial.
“We will measure streaming, and we will cover it around all devices,” Calhoun declared. “To be honest with you, the metric around the device itself is not difficult. It’s aligning the industry around the question of who gets credit. It will find its way into the commercially acceptable currency, but it’s not going to happen in a day.”
Neilsen makes a great point that this is where the market is going and we, at Convertro, are already serving this need. The audience measurement system can’t assign credit, but the customer path attribution does not have this issue. There is no need for agreement on crediting in a system based entirely on user response. By following the path that customers take in navigating marketing and information toward ultimately spending dollars, then the credit for those dollars spent can be given to each touchpoint for the role that it played in that path.
Jeff Zwelling
CEO of Convertro