Ratings Grab: The TV Industry Plots Its Multicurrency Future

When Nielsen, long viewed as the standard for measurement, lost its third-party accreditation status through the Media Rating Council in 2021, the TV industry—already reeling from the pandemic—was thrown into even more chaos. Publishers and marketers publicly began grappling with the urgent need to develop measurement alternatives and new currencies—just as audience behavior had begun rapidly shifting from linear to streaming. “Covid-19 completely changed people's consumption habits from an entertainment standpoint,” said Jen Faraci, chief data officer, Digitas North America. “And so with that, there are marketplace changes around where people spend their time, what that competition looks like, [and] how do we make sure we’re attracting the right type of audiences [as well as] understanding the people that we are reaching and how.” Seizing the opportunity, several ambitious measurement companies in the space, including VideoAmp, Comscore, iSpot.tv and more, have been rapidly striking deals with holding companies and publishers alike, launching test-and-learns, developing new solutions and claiming real estate as the industry tries to figure out what the next evolution of measurement looks like. “We've had a monopoly of one company that wasn't forced to innovate, so competition is extremely good for that,” said David Campanelli, evp and chief investment officer, Horizon Media. “And that will help keep measurement accurate and better if we can find alternatives that are as valuable or more valuable than the current system.” Nielsen CEO David Kenny on Nielsen One Learnings, Reaccreditation and What’s Next Measurement vs. currency While the public chatter around measurement seems to have quieted compared to the bluster a year ago, there is no less urgency among the industry to find new solutions and alternatives, especially as upfront negotiations kick off once again. This year, publishers, buyers and providers find themselves facing some of the same obstacles around measurement as they did last year—along with a few new ones. Multiple executives told Adweek that the biggest challenges include breaking through the noise of all the new alternatives, developing industrywide trust and a uniform set of standards, and correcting a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between measurement and currency. “Simply put, many assumed because there was measurement, it was a currency. Not the right assumption,” Kelly Metz, managing director, advanced TV activation at Omnicom Media Group, explained. “Currency means you can transact, and that was obviously a major point of confusion last year because plenty of measurement providers could measure effectively, but you could not transact, and you’re still seeing a bit of those struggles in today’s marketplace.” In 2022, more transactions than ever flowed through alternate currencies—that is, guarantees on metrics other than Nielsen’s. However, there were also significant struggles, with publishers promising alternative currency transactions ahead of the upfront that never came to fruition. “It was well intended, but when it came time to put your money where your mouth was, no one was doing it because there were too many complications,” Campanelli said of last year’s upfront marketplace. “This year, it’s different.” Several major publishers have already announced that in this year’s upfront, they're incorporating alternative currencies in addition to Nielsen. Warner Bros. Discovery said it will transact on VideoAmp and Comscore, while NBCU, which told Adweek that more than 40% of its transactions were across multiple currencies in 2022, expects that number to increase in 2023. Meanwhile, Paramount has been activating audience-based and demo-based guarantees on VideoAmp and Comscore since last year’s upfront. How the Big Measurement Companies Actually Measure Up Nielsen One: new, but improved? As the measurement world shifts around it, Nielsen has been busy making its own changes. The company went private last year and has begun rolling out its new flagship product. Nielsen One is designed to adapt to the changing tides as viewer habits move from appointment-based viewing into a more streaming-centric world as a cross-platform solution. It will be fully operational in late 2024 when the company sunsets C3, TV’s standard metric for commercial measurement. “If the world is moving more towards audiences, you have to build a measurement framework that is able to adapt to ads and make ad measurement comprehensive and specific,” said Karthik Rao, CEO at Nielsen Audience Measurement. Nielsen One is divided into two segments: one measuring content and another measuring ads, which Rao said is designed to enable a world where buying and selling can happen based on campaigns and audiences, as well as one where companies can sell based on content. Part of the Nielsen One offering, Nielsen One Ads, officially launched in January and is said to measure cross-media, deduplicated reach and frequency. “It’s a good way for people to start to get comfortable with how to work with this,” said Rao, noting that the TV currency will eventually change to be based on ads and content. “But this is enough of a change in itself that the market will probably need a fair amount of time to get used to it.” So far, early reviews of the new product are decidedly mixed. Speaking anonymously, some industry insiders told Adweek that Nielsen One had potential and said the company is being transparent about its tool kit and framework. However, others weren’t as impressed: One lamented that Nielsen has “deliberately confused the marketplace” due to the extended rollout of the product. “It's very hard for people in the marketplace, our clients in particular, to break through all the Nielsen messaging because Nielsen says Nielsen One is launched, but Nielsen One has not launched with their big data linear data set,” one buyer said, adding that the product seems more like Nielsen’s existing Digital Ad Ratings in a new dashboard. Another early point of contention: Nielsen One’s advanced audience offering, which one buyer said was “MRI survey audiences based on, like, 14,000 respondents. That's not an addressable audience. That's a hope and a prayer.” (Nielsen told Adweek that the offering will eventually add advanced audience enhancements.) Though Nielsen is taking its time regarding advanced audiences, companies like VideoAmp and Comscore are stepping things up through partnerships with various publishers such as Warner Bros. Discovery. Meanwhile, iSpot is choosing to focus on the broader demos, given that advanced audiences only make up about 5% of the marketplace, according to iSpot svp of agency partnerships Jodie McAfee. But despite the market changes and last year’s flurry of activity, things are still progressing slowly on the measurement front. In fact, according to Nielsen, part of the reason its new product, Nielsen One, has taken four years to build is to give the market time to adjust. “A lot of people were anxious to see Nielsen One, given that it has at least some tie to something everyone's familiar with,” Stacey Stewart, U.S. chief marketplace officer, UM, said. “But we're talking about changing billions and billions of dollars and how it's transacted, and I don't think anyone's anxious to just flip a switch and do it.” Third-party options Another element that often gets lost in the measurement mix is the work of third-party platforms like Mediaocean and OpenAP, which work to streamline the advertising workflow by providing marketers with a unified and standardized currency. But those efforts have also been bumpy. A publisher told Adweek that companies like Mediaocean are currently working to move from established workflows based on legacy Nielsen data to also service digital and streaming, which has been a challenge. According to publishers, Mediaocean is trying to pull in newer data sets, similar to what iSpot and VideoAmp are doing, in time for the upfront, but it is not yet connected to digital and streaming, meaning some of the newer metrics are not ingested in the data at this time. “Most buyers and sellers see a future that’s infused with rich data for planning, buying/selling, optimizing and reporting. Getting from where we are to where we want to be must happen in stages and takes significant investment and coordination,” said Ramsey McGrory, chief development officer at Mediaocean, in a statement to Adweek. McGrory added that the company plans to incorporate advanced measurement in its applications in time for the 2024 upfront, and is working on enabling alternative measurement providers on basic demo linear campaigns before moving to advanced audiences and converged linear/CTV measurement. The future of measurement Even with all of the increased focus on, and competition from, other measurement companies, could Nielsen really lose its top spot in the market? Rao, not surprisingly, dismissed the idea. “It has always been the case that there are other guarantees also made during the upfronts,” Rao said. “Nielsen was never 100%, and that’s a good thing because there are other things that augment what Nielsen does. It’s just that the noise level around it is higher [this year].” But still, Nielsen is closing in on its second full year without MRC certification. The organization specified six KPIs that the measurement company must bring back to the "highest standard," and Nielsen CEO David Kenny told Adweek that things are on the right track to do so. "I'm going to let the MRC comment on where it is because they manage that process," said Kenny. "But I would say I feel very confident that we are delivering on our KPIs right now." “While we generally do not comment on audits in progress, suffice to say that the accreditation review for Nielsen continues to be in process, and we will issue updates on this process as warranted,” David Gunzerath, MRC svp and associate director, said in a statement. Regardless of when—or whether—Nielsen restores its accreditation, sellers are beginning to embrace the need to move to cross-platform currencies, especially as ad-supported streaming businesses like Peacock and HBO Max—and now Disney+ and Netflix, entering their first upfront with new ad tiers—see growing and shifting audiences. “It’s a revolution, in a way, in terms of how we talk about TV buying in general,” Mike Bregman, chief data officer, Havas Media Group North America, said. “Now you have multiscreen, multidevice streaming data; I think it’s changing the game altogether. So you need a lot of these new measurement and currency providers to come in and provide that broad perspective of what’s happening with co-viewing and digital viewing.” What Buyers and TV Insiders Really Think About the Top Measurement Companies And publishers are starting to embrace the new reality, finding strength in numbers. “What you’re going to start to see is a more collaborative effort,” added Kelly Abcarian, evp of measurement and impact at NBCUniversal, "as opposed to having individual publishers like NBCU, Paramount and Disney going at this multicurrency future in a more stand-alone way. The industry is now fully awake and aware of the need to usher in new currencies, inclusive of Nielsen One.” As a result of that collaboration, the TV industry got together in January to announce the formation of the first U.S. Joint Industry Committee (JIC) to enable multiple currencies. OpenAP leads the operating group, which includes national programmers such as Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery; media agencies such as Dentsu, GroupM, Horizon Media and Omnicom Media Group; and the VAB. The committee will primarily focus on creating a measurement certification process to establish the suitability of cross-platform measurement solutions ahead of the 2024 upfront, and several buyers Adweek spoke with called the JIC a “tipping point” in the move toward multiple currencies. Thus far, the JIC has already provided its criteria for premium video cross-platform currencies to be transactional, inviting several of the biggest players in the space to participate. The group is set to deliver an update on its multicurrency progress on April 25. It’s an aggressive timeline, but one made with the knowledge that when Nielsen retires C3 in 2024, all currencies in the marketplace will be new. “We all know change is coming in 2024 and that the currency we’ve used for decades is going to disappear,” said Abcarian. “I’m really starting to see the buy-side lean in and work with us on how to use these new currencies and metrics.” This story is part of Adweek’s Finding the Customer digital package, which spotlights marketers’ efforts to accurately measure and track evolving consumer behaviors and engagement. How Measurement Is Evolving—and What Everyone’s Still Getting Wrong

Finding the Customer

Inside the TV Industry’s Numbers-Crunching to Build Its Multicurrency Future

With upfronts looming, there’s a new set of measurement obstacles to navigate this year

Mollie Cahillane

Bill Bradley

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Mollie Cahillane

Bill Bradley