Nielsen on Wednesday revealed two new updates to Nielsen One, the next phase of its cross-platform ad measurement product. The added features, advanced audiences and outcomes measurement, will be showcased at next week’s Cannes Lions festival.
Advanced audience capabilities allow advertisers to see who viewed their campaign, how viewers responded to that campaign, as well as how the campaign was delivered to niche audiences. Using advanced audiences, Nielsen says marketers will gain insights like impression as well as reach and frequency. Whereas outcomes measurement will provide indicators like return on investment and a campaign’s overall effectiveness.
Karthik Rao, Nielsen’s chief operating officer, said in a statement, “By previewing advanced audiences and outcomes measurement alongside reach and frequency metrics, we are helping marketers with a next generation solution where they will be able to better understand the value of the investments they are making, the targeted audiences they’re reaching, and the actions being taken in a single view.”
Nielsen One is currently in its alpha version but will be officially released at the start of 2023. These new features, however, will remain in alpha form after Nielsen One becomes available to the public.
The advanced audiences enhancement is part of Nielsen’s effort to shift towards impressions-based measurement, after the company came under fire last year for allegedly unreliable audience data.
Though Disney told Deadline in September it’s “increasingly concerned with inaccuracies and irregularities” in Nielsen data, it later signed on for the use of Nielsen One Alpha alongside other agencies and advertisers.
With Nielsen’s precarious position in the media industry, some companies are testing the waters with alternative measurement currencies. NBCUniversal recently shared the results of its alternative currency trials using data from iSpot.tv, as reported by NextTV.
“We are already living in a multi-currency future,” said Laura Molen, president of advertising sales and partnerships at NBCUniversal, at last month’s upfront presentation.
iSpot is one of several players in the growing alternative measurement space, with Comscore and VideoAmp also in the mix.
But despite the complicated measurement landscape, some companies are sticking with Nielsen. GroupM has said, according to NextTV, it will continue to transact using Nielsen data for the upfronts, but it is open to using alternative currencies.
Nielsen also recently expanded its smart TV data deal with Vizio, allowing the audience measurement company to access data from about 400 U.S. local stations.