Nielsen’s anticipated cross-platform measurement product, Nielsen One Ads, will hit the market next week on January 11, marking a critical development for the vendor.
Nielsen One Ads, which will provide reach and frequency as well as deduplicated ad views across linear, connected TV, desktop and mobile, aims to measure audiences at a more granular level. Specifically, the product will measure ads at the second-by-second level rather than at standard minute-by-minute levels.
Further enhancing data, Nielsen One Ads will include metrics from Nielsen One’s proprietary ID system alongside data from Nielsen’s panel-based measurement.
And those “always on” metrics will give ad buyers and publishers better visibility into their campaigns, which in turn will help them “find the most efficient and effective places to advertise to reach the right audiences,” according to Nielsen.
The primary rationale behind Nielsen One, according to Karthik Rao, CEO of audience measurement at Nielsen, is to bring clarity and simplicity to media buying and selling.
"By combining the scale of big data and granular insights from our people-based panel, Nielsen One provides comprehensive, representative measurement of ads and content for our clients to transact with confidence,” Rao stated.
Nielsen One’s initial launch is a key step for Nielsen in improving its credibility in the measurement space. The Media Rating Council suspended the firm’s industry accreditations in September 2021, citing “material standards non-compliance or operational issues” with Nielsen’s measurement process, including panel size and maintenance, insufficient transparency about methodology, among other reasons.
Despite Nielsen’s hopes of regaining accreditation last year, the MRC audit committee in November voted to keep the company’s national TV ratings suspended. But the MRC told Fierce at the time Nielsen has made “significant progress on most of the issues” leading to its suspension, adding a reinstatement of accreditation “may occur relatively soon.”
Nielsen One will also include previously disclosed advanced audiences and outcomes measurement features, which will be available in alpha form sometime after Nielsen One Ads’ commercial release. TelevisaUnivision is one media company that has inked a deal to use Nielsen One measurement for its linear and digital platforms.
Even though Nielsen One has yet to fully launch, Nielsen in the past year has beefed up its audience measurement portfolio. Amazon has enlisted Nielsen to measure coverage of Thursday Night Football. Whereas YouTube and Roku are tapping into the vendor’s ad deduplication capabilities.
Nielsen isn’t the only company making moves in audience measurement, as alternative currency providers are also looking to carve a name for themselves. VideoAmp, which actually introduced second-by-second ad measurement in October, scored a measurement deal this week with Warner Bros. Discovery.
Also this week, DoubleVerify, one of Netflix’s ad measurement partners, obtained MRC accreditation for its attention-based analytics.