Commentary

The Futility Of Media Measurement

Less than a week after it was announced that Comscore had lost Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for its Media Metrix digital desktop audience measurement service, the MRC announced it had reinstated accreditation for Nielsen's national TV measurement service. How’s that for timing? Hit ‘em while they’re down just before the upfront season.

The two companies have been battling it out for years. Before Comscore, it was Nielsen vs. Arbitron and we all know how that story ended. In fact, for many years Comscore was run by a CEO who was a former Arbitron executive. He is currently its vice chairman.

Nielsen has been taking a huge amount of heat for underreporting ratings during the pandemic. Apparently, it should have made its field representatives man-up and get those sample homes back online. COVID death and intubation be damned, dollars are being exchanged based on its estimates.

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Perhaps this description is too glib. However, there is much truth to it. The pandemic caused problems no company could have expected to confront. Nielsen probably did not adequately communicate the situation to clients. Its employees were likely too timid to say anything. This isn’t an excuse, but you can certainly see how it could happen.

As for the impacted TV network clients, they already were losing audiences to digital streaming services and their business models are under duress. Audiences from their own new digital streaming services haven’t been enough to replace lost linear viewing. You can understand why they were so upset. It added to an already bad set of circumstances.

The pandemic problem isn’t the only criticism Nielsen is facing. There is also the issue that Nielsen has been too slow to add viewing from digital TV sources into its numbers. They haven’t been able to count everything. As a result, there are some very angry sell-side customers who are making life extremely difficult for the company, including an effort to implement a joint industry committee (JIC) like those in other countries.

Well, not exactly like other countries, where JICs review available measurement offerings and pick one to provide its ad industry currency for some agreed length of time. If implemented in the U.S., this would give the industry a great deal of control over measurement. It could even attempt to oust Nielsen by choosing a different vendor.

Unfortunately for Nielsen, it’s the clients who experience negative consequences that are most vocal. Even if proposed changes are methodological improvements, its clients can get upset. To make things worse its clients’ motivation isn’t always about research accuracy, it can be about winning vs. losing and about how much money they can charge for ads.

Worst of all, clients who benefit from the changes don’t often step in to quiet the situation or defend Nielsen.

Negatively impacted clients can go to great lengths to pressure Nielsen. Does anyone remember Fox’s grassroots “Don’t Count Us Out” campaign, which claimed Nielsen didn’t properly count minorities back in the 90s? That Nielsen client involved local and national politicians including Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton. It was a major headache for Nielsen’s management.

The problem had to do with the rollout of local people meters and how sample homes were chosen. If you owned or worked for a TV network that had a large amount of minority viewing, the inclusion or exclusion of minority homes would disproportionately impact your ratings. For the record, no researcher worth a salt would ever dispute that the people meter methodology was not better than dairies.

The truth is that Nielsen isn’t slow to innovate because it lacks talent, creativity, and motivation. It is slow because it has a diverse client base.

Methodological improvements cause change, and the consequences aren’t often evenly dispersed. There tends to be some numbers that go up and some that go down. As a result, there are groups of Nielsen clients who are positively impacted, and other groups that have negative consequences. Some clients will the want the changes and others will object. This creates logjams that can go on for some time, while little gets done and time accumulates. All of this while the claim that Nielsen is slow to innovate is reinforced in the minds of its client base.

Does anyone think for a second that any of this will be different if Nielsen were replaced by another company? The new company would be in the same predicament Nielsen is in. The players and dynamics will not have changed.

Methodological improvements will still cause inequitable outcomes. There will still be winners and losers. The losers will still be more vocal, and the winners will still be just as quiet. The losers won’t be any more altruistic in their motivations. The lack of forward movement resulting from negatively affected clients’ objections to changes will still be a problem. More won’t get done and time will still add up.

The new company would now be criticized for being slow to innovate instead of Nielsen. Media measurement will not have improved, only the name of the research firm will have changed. At some point the new research company would succumb to the same dynamics that befell Nielsen. It will be overtaken by another newer research firm and the cycle will start all over again. 

This is the futility of media measurement.

5 comments about "The Futility Of Media Measurement".
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  1. Dan Ciccone from STACKED Entertainment, April 20, 2023 at 1:14 p.m.

    Nielsen's worst enemies are its own management and agencies and publications who let its constant screw ups go unpunished.  When was the last time we went a year without reading about Nielsen scewing something up in a major way?


    There are LOTS of technologies that could make Nielsen more accurate and more accountable, but based on its history of buying companies and technologies and then quashing them, Nielsen has only proved it has enough money to buy up any formiddable competition while purposely not incorporating technologies to make its measurement more accurate.


    The industry needs to stop making excuses for Nielsen and create an X Prize for a company that proves it can do measurement better than Nielsen and then create some real competition instead of giving Nielsen chance after chance to get it right.

  2. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, April 20, 2023 at 2:11 p.m.

    This article starts out like another hit piece against Nielsen but ends with some very good points. It is a mistake, however to mix national TV ratings with local ones as is done at the outset. The two operate very differently and for very good reasons. To begin with neither Arbitron nor Comscore has effectively competed with Nielsen for the national TV rating business---it's has mostly been at the local level. In fact Arbitron was the long time leader in  the local market TV rating field but Nieslen overcame it after a long, hard, battle.

    The basic difference between national and local TV ratings are the demands of both sellers and buyers. On a national level, they insist on much greater care, finer ---or more granular---reporting, faster reporting, the exclusion of commercial zappers, audiences estimated on a minute by minute basis, all key  demos reported, not just age and sex, larger samples, etc. etc. And this is what they have been getting, primarily because the sellers have the funding needed to support a "better" research design.

    In contrast, many stations do not have the funding required to support the same  kinds of samples and the depth of reporting for ratings in their markets. So the quality is down and the manner of reporting is far from "granular".

    Which brings me to the most fundamental point. TV ratings---national or local---were never intended to provide measurements of minute by minute "viewing". All that was needed---or so it was believed--was program viewing claims on the absurd assumption that if you "watched " the program you probably "watched" the commercials.  Only recently has everyone awakened to the oft-demonstrated truth that this was never the case. Add to that the incremental audiences that can be attained via digital devices plus the advent of streaming and you suddenly find everyone demnding that Nielsen find  a way to include such "audiences" in its national ratings so the sellers can monetize" them.And this demand must be met ASAP---aka instantly---when, in reality, there are serious issues to be dealt with regarding comparability, data projectability, etc.

    Maybe, Nielsen has moved too cautiously on these new demands, maybe not. But it seems to have come up with a "big data" solution for its national ratings that should please the sellers---assuming that it passes  muster with the MRC and the findings make sense. Even though Nielsen is not addressing the pivotal question of including attentiveness---as its major clients---the sellers---- fear that-----why not calm down and give Nielsen---which is the only national "audience" game in town---- a chance to show what it's new plan can provide?TV should be able to survive such a short wait---by using the existing Nielsen people meter panel a bit longer.

  3. Tony Jarvis from Olympic Media Consultancy, April 20, 2023 at 6:28 p.m.

    Ed & Ed:  Solid article and commentary. Regarding JICs, "... JICs review available measurement offerings and pick one to provide its ad industry currency for some agreed length of time. If implemented in the U.S., this would give the industry a great deal of control over measurement".  Exactly.  And the industry would save $millions while reducing the rancor.  However, few appear to be willing to embrace the fundmental values of an actual JIC.  A better title?  The Chaos of Media Measurement within the Existing System.

  4. Andy Grossman from Augie Editorial Services, April 21, 2023 at 8:09 a.m.

    In all transparency, this commentary should have noted that the author is a former Nielsen executive. 

  5. Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., April 21, 2023 at 8:49 a.m.

    @Andy Grossman: All of our op-ed commentator's byline link to their bios, and Ed DeNicola's clearly states his past affiliations, it also includes a link to his LinkedIn profile for a more detailed time line:

    Ed DeNicola started his career in media at a cable TV network. He spent just short of 20 years at The Nielsen Companyworking mostly with TV networks and DBS providers including: A+E, CNBC, Disney, Starz/Encore, ESPN, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, DIRECTV and Dish. He is a Nielsen-trained media researcher. From there, he learned TV set-top box ad targeting from the company that invented it (TiVo Research, formerly TRA) and had an opportunity to apply those learnings for a political consultancy in primary races and the 2016 US presidential election.

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