Nielsen Rectifying Panel Makeup After Audience Undercount

Nielsen is issuing guidance to its media partners about the revelation that its pandemic TV audience measurement may have been off by as much as 6% and is aiming to complete maintenance on nearly 10,000 panel homes by the end of the month. The conversations and guidance, which Nielsen has been communicating to its clients Tuesday morning, come after the measurement firm’s late Monday admission that in February, audience counts for Total Usage of Television time (or TUT) were lowballed by between 2% and 6%, while its Persons Using Television metric (or PUT) was understated by between 1-4%.Those undercounts could translate to hundreds of millions of dollars of lost advertising revenue, the industry group the Video Advertising Bureau alleged Monday night after Nielsen and the independent Media Rating Council released their findings. One wrinkle in determining the extent of the issue remains: Nielsen won’t aim to retroactively review its audience figures throughout the Covid-19 pandemic period, due to the challenges of making accurate estimations over that period of time. Increasing the in-home panel “You can only go backwards so far,” Kim Gilberti, Nielsen’s svp, product leadership, told Adweek. “We know what happened in the homes when we visited them, which we started in the latter part of March, and we’re doing the best we can to make assumptions about what was true in the homes in February. But the further back in time you go, the less likely those assumptions are to be accurate.” In an effort to rectify any concerns about its panel, Nielsen is rushing to increase its in-home panel back to it pre-pandemic size “as quickly as humanly possible,” Gilberti said. First, though, the company needs to address about 9,400 homes in its panel, which have been identified as having problems. That process, which Nielsen is also racing to address, will likely be completed by the end of May. “Right now, the focus is really getting back in the field and making sure we’re addressing the issues, but also growing the sample size,” said Mainak Mazumdar, Nielsen’s chief research officer. “The panel is the focus going forward.” Nielsen Confirms Undercount of Pandemic TV Viewership Following Standoff With Networks Nielsen’s efforts to shore up its in-home panel set and make amends with its network clients come as the latest development in an ongoing back-and-forth between the measurement firm and the television networks, who began publicly pressuring the firm a month ago to review and adjust audience measurement figures that they believed to be unusually low. The Video Advertising Bureau, an industry group representing most of the major TV networks, took to the offensive in April, charging Nielsen with both undercounting audiences throughout the pandemic and stonewalling clients’ requests for information about discrepancies. The issue has hinged on how Nielsen maintained its in-home panel, which comprises the backbone of its rating system and gives the TV industry buy-side and sell-side metrics with which to set rates and plan media against. Nielsen recruits households around the country to have their household viewing habits monitored as the framework of its measurement system, but the company had to press pause on in-home maintenance visits, which check to make sure monitoring equipment is working properly and that people are actually in the homes, due to Covid-19 restrictions. An about-face Nielsen had maintained publicly and privately that the problem was not substantial and that its measurement was sound, and declined to undergo a third-party audit into its figures. Just last month, Mazumdar told Adweek that the firm believed that “the quality of the panel not only holds up but is statistically valid, and the estimates we’re providing is actually what’s happening in those homes.” But that changed Monday when the firm issued the additional guidance borne out of a review and simulation of TV audiences in February 2021 in concert with the MRC. Still, Nielsen has maintained that 93% of its C3 adults 18-49 rating changes for the major networks saw “no more than a 0.02 change in rating points” due to the low-balled audience figures, a spokesperson told Adweek yesterday. The VAB, though, says those small inaccuracies could translate to hundreds of millions in lost ad revenue. “It could very quickly get up to be $1 billion, $1.2 billion, $1.4 billion,” VAB CEO Sean Cunningham told press late Monday about the amount of money on the table. “Single digits can be extrapolated to mean a heck of a lot of money.” That could have wide implications during upfronts talks as the networks brace for a busy spending season and look to provide guidance and secure competitive rates with brands and agencies. It could also stand to shake confidence in Nielsen’s measurement, and Nielsen is looking to assuage clients’ concerns by focusing on the future of the company’s measurement plans. As it provides the new data to clients, the company is emphasizing that it has implemented some systems to allow Nielsen staff to remotely install and remotely troubleshoot panel homes, and is looking to implement its forthcoming measurement system Nielsen One. “We want our clients to understand the roadmap beyond what the current season will look like, and that is around the inclusion of big data into our measurement and our panel recovery. and all of the things that will make our measurement stronger,” Gilberti said. “Our message to our clients is about looking forward to how we’re going to get past what was such an unprecedented and strange time with Covid and how we get to a state where we all want to be with Nielsen One.”

TV Upfronts

Nielsen Looks to Rectify Panel Makeup After Admitting Pandemic Audience Undercount

Firm will complete 9,400 home visits by end of May and is issuing guidance to clients

Kelsey Sutton

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Kelsey Sutton