Nielsen, Networks Face Off Over Pandemic TV Audience Measurement

Ahead of this year’s upfronts season, Nielsen and a major industry trade group representing the major television networks are butting heads over the measurement firm’s metrics over the last year. The Video Advertising Bureau, which represents major networks including A+E Networks, Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS, this week accused Nielsen of “systemically under-counting” television viewership from March 2020 through March 2021 due to gaps in Nielsen’s industry-standard panel, which collects detailed viewing information from households around the U.S. Nielsen, meanwhile, says that while it had to change its panel-maintenance protocols due to the pandemic, its numbers are sound—and there are industry reasons why television viewership dipped in the second half of 2020. The face-off comes ahead of the 2021 TV upfronts, where networks are looking to lock in advertising rates that hinge on Nielsen audience numbers, which have long served as the measurement backbone of the industry. VAB charges Nielsen with measurement 'defects' due to Covid-19 At the root of the disagreement coming to a head this week is the extent of audience declines that networks recorded in 2020, which the VAB says is due to faulty metrics on the part of Nielsen. On Thursday, VAB president Sean Cunningham said the measurement firm’s months-long suspension of in-home maintenance visits to panel households, which helps ensure the accuracy of the viewing data Nielsen collects, led to too-high drops in TV viewership. The industry group’s top executives, including Cunningham and executive vice president Danielle DeLauro, charge that drops in viewership did not match other data about viewership trends in the year, which alarmed networks. “We know that there are going to be segments of television declines,” Cunningham told reporters during a virtual press conference late Thursday. “The challenge right now is there’s no visibility in what are the actual declines and what are the exaggerated declines. And the culprit behind this really is an anomaly, and that was Nielsen’s 11-month suspension of their in-home panel responsibilities.” That suspension, Cunningham charged, “led to defects that produced systematic and compounded undercounting of overall TV use.” The organization is pushing for Nielsen to provide guidance for networks to adjust their metrics, which could help shore up audience figures and improve the rates networks can demand. But Nielsen says panel data holds up Nielsen, meanwhile, blames the audience declines to a dry-up of new programming and intensifying consumer shifts to video-on-demand, and is insisting that the data it collected from its panels in the last year is indeed accurate despite some Covid-related changes. In a blog post published Friday afternoon, the company detailed how its panel-managing protocols changed over the course of the pandemic, which included a pause on in-home activities and a temporarily smaller sample size. Still, Nielsen said, the panel was representative, and the firm has seen no evidence suggesting that changes to its panel and maintenance protocols during the pandemic “materially changed” audience estimates. “We feel pretty good in terms of the quality of the panel, the coverage of the panel and the measurement of the panel, despite the challenges that we all faced during Covid over the last 12 months,” Mainak Mazumdar, Nielsen’s chief data officer, told Adweek. “We feel like 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.” Nielsen’s explanation as to the audience declines hinges on programming decisions and the limited output of new shows due to Covid-19—a problem squarely out of Nielsen’s control. “In looking at available programming options, there were 13% fewer new episodes on traditional TV in October 2020 compared with the same month in 2019,” the company wrote in its post Friday. “That led to a 75% increase in programming repeats. Additionally, a Nielsen analysis of broadcast programming determined that the premiere dates during the 2020-2021 TV season aired almost a month (29 days) later than in the previous year. With less new linear programming available, the shift to video on demand (VOD) content wasn’t surprising.” The VAB isn’t convinced, and says that Nielsen’s guidance, which includes a white paper offering more details about Covid-19’s effects on measurement and suggesting judgment be used when evaluating the data doesn’t go far enough. “Using judgment is not a way to help set price, and it’s not the level of transparency that we need with a data set that had no service for a year,” Cunningham said. Not the first fight The squabble may only intensify as upfront talks continue and as Nielsen looks to plant a stake in the ground around its upcoming measurement solution Nielsen One, which it wants the industry to embrace once it rolls out in 2022. It’s the second such squabble between Nielsen and the networks in less than a year, after Nielsen’s plan to delay the roll-out of out-of-home viewing data threw a wrench into 2020 upfront talks that had already been counting on that data for rate-setting. In that case, Nielsen’s decision caused such a ruckus that the firm quickly reversed course and rolled out the addition of the data on its original timeline.