Nielsen announced a major do-over of its media measurement and tracking platform this week. David Kenny, Nielsen's chief executive officer and chief diversity officer, called it "a single
cross-media solution to drive comparable and comprehensive metrics across all platforms." It will launch in 2024.
The year 2024 will be the final year of Joe Biden’s first term as
president (God willing). It will be a year where every human on the planet has been inoculated for COVID-19. It will be the year of the Paris summer Olympics. And, if all goes to plan, it will be the
year of the third manned moon mission, Artemis III.
Given what humanity has gone through in 2020, it is probably fair to say it’s impossible to know if any or all of these things will
actually happen. But it seems the Nielsen launch is a reasonable certainty.
From the inception of digital media as a viable advertising medium, marketers have complained that it is hard to
know which media touchpoints deliver what amount of audience. In fact, they complained about the lack of a standardized metric (“media currency”) across all paid media even before digital
media. For at least 50 years, marketers have wanted the ability to assign TV-like ratings to radio, out-of-home and print, and now digital.
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Sure, it was hard to provide an answer to this
quest, as the measurement technology way back when was simplistic (written diaries, anyone?). It’s also fair to say that part of the blame for not figuring it out has to be placed with media
owners and agencies. When times were good -- their existence was not under threat from newcomers, and the status quo safeguarded their lucrative positions -- there was little incentive to promote or
support the quest for insights that would show how each medium performed relative to one another.
Some countries, like the U.K. and The Netherlands, did have multimedia initiatives in prior
years. But these were typically complementary efforts that could not and did not deliver the holy grail of ratings across all touchpoints.
It was in October of 2009 that multiple TV networks,
P&G, and a few media buying agencies here in the U.S. announced the creation of The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement. Its initial intent was to directly challenge Nielsen, and to
“look for ways to measure TV ratings data across multiple platforms and make the results publicly available” per The Hollywood Reporter. That never happened. In 2020, Nielsen is
still firmly in place as the single oracle of ratings.
And now, at long last, Nielsen itself is taking the step to provide multi-touchpoint ratings. Many advertisers and marketers have
commented with encouragement and support for the effort. Can I offer a counterpoint?
Is it possible that by 2024, we will buying mostly audiences rather than ratings? And that these audiences
come packaged with knowledge about who they are, where we get them, how many we hit how often, etc.? In other words, just when Nielsen finally cracks open the multi-touchpoint holy grail, the industry
will have moved on and have limited need for such a solution? It is entirely possible. I am less certain about those Artemis missions, though….