IPG Mediabrands' Magna, Disney Join Nielsen One Alpha
- by Wayne Friedman , December 21, 2021
Nielsen has added new partners -- Walt Disney and Magna, the media agency investment/research unit of IPG Mediabrands -- to a group of media agencies, advertisers and publishers -- for its initial “iteration” of its forthcoming major cross-platform measure, Nielsen One.
Called Nielsen One Alpha, the effort is a deduplicated ad measurement service, accounting for age and gender information, which spans across all screens -- linear TV, connected TV, computer and mobile. It will focus on ad campaigns, not programming.
The highly anticipated Nielsen One is set for a full, formal launch in December 2022.
Nielsen did not disclose other participants for Nielsen One Alpha.
Nielsen has been working on enhancements during the past year in anticipation of Nielsen One. This includes modification of its digital and national TV services.
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Some changes have been the on-boarding of big data, which will be included into its national TV measurement service in September 2022, rebranding its streaming TV suite of products, starting an identity resolution system and improving national television with measurement of individual commercials metrics.
In September, the Media Rating Council suspended accreditation of Nielsen's national TV ratings service and removed the accreditation "hiatus" status from Nielsen's local people meter and set meter market services.
Nielsen's hiatus request followed news that the media measurement company had underreported viewing, due to maintenance issues arising as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wayne, from what I can see, Nielsen is going to try to measure the reach and frequency of specific TV commercials across platforms---for individual brand campaigns. Sounds like a good idea until you think about the measurement itself---it will be whether an ad message is on the consumers' screens---in the case of ditital venues, I assume, for at least two seconds. That's all. Viewing of the ad message will be assumed----not measured--- which means that about 65% of the time when it is believed that a consumer "saw" an ad message the consumer wasn't even present nor looking at the screen. I wouldn't expect much to be gleaned from such data---only hints, not hard edged findings.
Mark, a number of years ago some of the larger media agencies spent a fair amount of time and money evaluating commercial- specific people meter data to determine how much their reach and frequency formulas differed from "actual" measurements of individual commercial "exposures", the true r&f of their campaigns, and other issues such as positioning in breaks, the impact of shorter messages, etc. etc. Unfortunately,these efforts did not produce anything like the degree of sensitivity that might have been expected. The reason being that most of the Nielsen panel members who were counted as reached for individual commercial placements did dot see or were not paying attention when the ads appeared on their screens.
As for estimating the actual reach of TV ad campaigns, using unadjusted or adjusted GRPs, that's an easy thing to estimate---we've done it for years. You don't need a service for that. What's needed is an attentiveness measurement---I know, I've been banging on about this for years---decades, in fact----but it's the only way we are going to really determine how many people see ads or ad campaigns in their totallity.
Ed, we are on the same page. It's the story of The Emperor's clothing.. Making bad better isn't best, but it is still better. Would seem that our industry remains unready to "ad-just".
Totally agree with the comments.
The issue is how you can measure 'attention' (assuming a universal definition of what attentionactually is). We know that attention varies by many orders of magnitude between each media. Attention also varies between media 'puiblishers'. Further, attention varies by the publishers material (programme, magazine, billboard location, etc.). Other variables include time-of-day, age, gender etc.
I think it would take billions of dollars to quantify the above to an acceptable level. Oh, and I think it would need at leaat annual updating.
But could we adopt averages? For example, online has CTR data? Could we use a mean CTR rate? Maybe split by Search (say around 2%) and Display (say around 0.5%) and apply that. While it may not reflect a site's actual rate, wouldn't it have some benefit in a system that stacks the 'attentive delivery' of each medium against the others. For example, Ed's post suggests 35% for TV. In a past AU example the mean of a billboard would be around the 25% rate. While you will lose some on the roundabout you could pick it up on the swing.
If such a wildcat idea works, resources could then applied to 'sharpening the pencil' and have attention data by things like age, gender, time-of-day, day-of-week, content type.
Then the hard bit would start - re-duplicating the 'attentive audience'. Ideally we could have a de-duplication matrix based on similar multinomial approach. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would probably be better.