Nielsen Will Add Set-Top Box, Smart TV Data to National TV Measurement Service

Nielsen is readying its plans to add big data to its beleaguered national TV measurement service as its march toward a single cross-platform metric continues. The measurement firm has this month begun to track and collect set-top box and smart television viewership data to complement its in-house panel data, it informed clients this week. Beginning in January, impact data gleaned from that added big data—which comes from companies like Dish, DirecTV, Vizio and Roku—will become available to Nielsen clients, allowing the industry to become familiarized with seasonality trends and other changes that may be present in the augmented data set. A full switch to the enhanced data, which will coalesce in-house panel data with those big data sources, is slated for September 2022. Nielsen sent a letter to clients this week, and informed them the planned addition is part of the company’s continued efforts toward Nielsen One, a single cross-platform metric that is aimed at providing the industry with more comparable measurement between linear television and digital. Nielsen Sets 2022 Pivot to Impressions-Based Local TV Buying In an interview with Adweek, Nielsen chief research officer Mainak Mazumdar said the addition of the big data will help improve the company’s national TV measurement by significantly expanding the scale of what Nielsen will be able to measure. The data points will add more than 100 million set-top boxes and smart TVs into Nielsen’s platform, which will allow Nielsen to measure smaller and more regional networks and channels that may not have a large enough sample size in the Nielsen panel to be reported. The move will also support an expanded insertion of linear addressable ads in all commercial minutes for Dish, DirecTV, Vizio and Roku. Combining 'granularity' and 'quality' Nielsen is proceeding cautiously, primarily because set-top box data (called return-path data) and smart TV data (or automatic content recognition) both have known biases that can incorrectly represent the U.S. populace. According to Nielsen’s review of the incoming data sets against its panel, return-path data from set-top boxes alone has underrepresented Hispanic populations by around 30% and Black populations by around 20%. Automatic content recognition data from smart TVs, meanwhile, has been shown to underrepresent both older households and single-person homes by around 30%, Mazumdar said. Combine those data sets with Nielsen’s in-home panel, which is calibrated against census population estimates, and Nielsen says it can adjust the big data appropriately to deliver more accurate measurement and correct for those known limitations. “Big data has the granularity, and the panel has the quality,” Mazumdar said. “We bring those two together and you have the best of both.” The plans come amid a fraught time for Nielsen’s national TV measurement service, which was placed in the penalty box by the third-party accreditation firm the Media Rating Council following months of questions about the accuracy of Nielsen’s in-house panel data over the duration of the pandemic. Nielsen has vowed to make the appropriate fixes, and the firm continues to be in close contact with the MRC as it brings its panel back to pre-pandemic size and works toward re-accreditation, Mazumdar said. Adding in big data to the national TV service also requires a sign-off from the MRC for accreditation, and the MRC is reviewing Nielsen’s methodology in another accreditation process related to the big data addition, Mazumdar said. The update is one of several adjustments that Nielsen has planned as it continues to work toward Nielsen One and assuage the industry that it should remain the primary currency upon which media is transacted. This week, Nielsen announced that its local TV ratings service, which also lost its accreditation, will switch to impressions-based buying next year and will begin counting broadband-only homes as part of its measurement. That, too, is another step toward the single cross-media measurement tool that the firm has promised the industry.