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In late August, the Media Rating Council issued a blow to Nielsen that is still sending ripple effects through the television and media industry. Beginning in mid-September, the measurement firm’s national and local TV ratings services—long the standard-bearer of the industry, used to determine the fates of new series and set advertising rates—would lose its third-party accreditation.
That means that as the television industry settles further into fall and the new TV season kicks into full gear, Nielsen’s national TV service no longer has that MRC stamp of approval. While the measurement firm is racing to apply fixes and is working with the MRC to get re-accredited, those processes and reviews take time—meaning that TV advertisers and broadcasters alike find themselves in something of a sticky situation. The figures they have long transacted on no longer have the backing that once was relatively unimpeachable in the marketplace.
“This leaves the industry without an MRC-accredited third-party measurement solution for national linear television,” said Kelly Metz, managing director, advanced TV activation, Omnicom Media Group. “What kind of world does that create for us?”
For now, it’s a world that remains unchanged even with the lapsed accreditation, meaning that Nielsen’s national TV ratings service and its local TV ratings are still being relied upon for various functions. “Practically speaking, nothing changes,” Metz said. “We continue to buy and execute the way that we have purchased television, and we’re continuing to receive Nielsen ratings as the way we are reconciling these guarantees.”
With that said, Nielsen’s public pitfalls have supercharged an industry-wide initiative to overhaul the measurement landscape. “We do need a shift in how we measure and how we monetize, and the legacy of Nielsen and the legacy of media-mix modeling has prevented that,” said one media buyer, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the matter. “And there is so much data and technology today available in everything we do. I would hope this would provide an opportunity to completely change, shift, recreate the way we evaluate, measure and monetize.”
‘You can’t rely on a tiny panel’
Nielsen has legacy, trust and scale on its side, which makes the company tough to topple. “Love them or hate them, it’s really hard to rip Nielsen out of the TV ecosystem and replace them with anything else,” said Jim Nail, principal analyst at the research firm Forrester.
But momentum is building to find alternatives and additives, and some shifts have already occurred as organizations look for more comprehensive ways to track shifting audiences. Omnicom Media Group no longer relies on Nielsen for media planning purposes, Metz said, a switch the holding company made due to the continued anticipated growth of over-the-top video viewing compared to traditional linear viewing.
“You can’t rely on a tiny panel to deal with that from a measurement perspective,” Metz explained. “A panel can inform, but it can’t be the sole basis for how you are understanding holistic measurement. On-demand creates a whole different measurement environment.”
The crisis about Nielsen ratings accuracy and the eventual de-accreditation has intensified that appetite for change, and buyers and sellers alike are loudly emphasizing their desire for something new. On a call with investors in August, Discovery Inc. CEO David Zaslav, who will soon helm the combined Warner Bros. Discovery, said he hoped the industry would leave Nielsen “in the dust;” at the Television Critics Association’s annual summer press tour last month, CBS Entertainment president Kelly Kahl indicated a shift away from working exclusively with the measurement firm.
“We are now working with a variety of companies that bring fresh thinking to increasingly complex audience measurement, which is clearly needed,” Kahl said.
Broadcasters are also taking steps to make alternative measurement options a viable option. NBCUniversal, which hired former Nielsen executive Kelly Abcarian last April to head up measurement initiatives, issued a missive about building alternative measurement and revealed that the company was seeking out proposals from other measurement companies. Just last week, ViacomCBS told marketers it would begin allowing them to transact on metrics provided by VideoAmp.
Those efforts are in turn giving fuel to third-party competitors who say they can offer measurement options that can help guide the industry. Comscore is bulking up its own measurement capabilities, and is rolling out person-level viewership estimates as it looks to address the shifts in the marketplace.
Other contenders are vying for more market space behind the scenes and are looking to ingratiate themselves further with broadcasters—and some firms that broadcasters already rely upon for additional measurement include DataPlusMath, Conviva, Truthset and iSpot, according to one person at a major broadcast network.
Nielsen pushes back
Despite the pressure, Nielsen is not giving up so easily. In addition to racing to make updates, including adding big data into its measurement capabilities, the firm is also pushing back against broadcaster pressure.
In a recent interview with Adweek, Nielsen CEO David Kenny suggested that some of the company’s loudest critics are legacy players who have the most to lose.
“The criticisms are not coming at us from digital platforms,” Kenny said. “They’re not coming at us from advertisers who really want to buy an integrated base. By and large, I think the issue is to make sure that measurement evolves in the way the consumer watches today and doesn’t stay rooted in legacy because legacy players don’t want to change it yet.”
He also suggested that those legacy players have meant that the de-accreditation process was less than fair.
“It’s become more political than it should, as opposed to everybody stepping back using the work that’s already been done by the advertising industry about what is actually the right way to measure, so that we’re holding ourselves accountable to the future,” Kenny told Adweek. “I think now is the time we need to be upfront about that.”
Not everyone is buying it. In late September, the 4A’s and the 4A’s Measurement Committee issued a statement affirming their support of the MRC and rejecting the claim that it was in any way biased.
“There have been several voices and articles challenging the validity of the MRC and its audit process, sometimes pointing to the number of potential competitors in the space that don’t have MRC accreditation for their individual measurement solution,” the 4A’s said. “The advertising and marketing industry must continue supporting the MRC for their actions to hold measurement companies to consistent standards required by the industry.”
Jason Lynch contributed reporting to this article.
