Nielsen’s National Out-of-Home Reporting Service, which launched in October 2016, is beginning to gain some traction, particularly in the sports television space. The company announced today that Fox Sports is the newest subscriber to the ratings reporting service, which measures TV commercial viewing in restaurants, bars, hotels, gyms, and airports.
The company and its cable sports networks, including FS1, FS2, and Fox Deportes, will now receive weekly reports that show daily data for program and commercial audience estimates for live through live-plus-seven viewing.
The measurement is a fusion of in-home viewing, based on Nielsen’s National TV ratings data, with out-of-home viewing based data from Nielsen’s portable people meter (PPM) panels, which has approximately 77,000 installed panelists across 44 markets.
“Sports are being watched everywhere, every day and on every type of screen. Our business has to keep pace with changes in viewer behavior,” said Eric Shanks, president, chief operating & executive producer, Fox Sports. “Nielsen’s out-of-home measurement enables us to measure our audience wherever they may be, which in turn allows us to better service the advertising industry.”
According to Nielsen, Fox Broadcast’s NFL regular season saw a 16 percent lift from out-of-home measurement among the ad-friendly A18-49 demo. Nielsen’s out-of-home service data pointed to a younger, more diverse, increasingly female and more affluent audience than Fox Sports’ in-home NFL audience.
“Fox Sports has some of the most exciting and fan-favorite sporting events and we are thrilled to extend our relationship by providing them with out-of-home measurement that demonstrates their incremental audience,” said Lynda Clarizio, president, Nielsen U.S. Media. “We are committed to providing our clients with a complete view of their total audience regardless of where consumers are viewing their content. Our out-of-home measurement service is another piece of Nielsen Total Audience delivering to subscribing clients richer and more robust insights into their viewers, as well as helping to uncover new and valuable audience segments.”
ESPN and ESPN2 signed up for the service back in April.
As is the case with sports, plenty of viewers consume cable news at hotels, gyms, bars, and the workplace. With that in mind, it might not be a bad idea for those networks to follow the lead of ESPN and Fox Sports.