• by Joe Mandese , May 3, 2023

A week after shelving Nielsen One Ads as the official currency for the 2023-24 season, Nielsen this morning announced it is deploying the "alpha" launch for its content measurement counterpart service -- Nielsen One Content.

Both of the services have been in development for years, and utilize a hybrid methodology combining Nielsen's panel with sources of Big Data.

The content ratings alpha follows the general release of Nielsen One Ads earlier this year, including months of "impact data," enabling advertisers, agencies and media sellers to begin planning strategies for negotiating this year's upfront ad marketplace, but Nielsen announced a decision last week to hold off on One Ads official transition to a marketplace currency, and will instead stick with its legacy TV audience measurement panel service.

Nielsen said it was making that move because it was endorsing Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation as a requirement for ad-market currencies, and its legacy panel service recently was reaccredited by the MRC.

In a statement, Nielsen Audience Measurement Chief Product Officer Deirdre Thomas cited the importance of rolling out an alpha for the new content ratings service so that clients can kick the tires and help refine the product.

"That will set the stage," she stated, announcing that the alpha clients include media shops Mediahub and Horizon Media, as well as AMC Networks Disney, Sony Pictures Television and TelevisaUnivision.

Nielsen described the rollout as the "first iteration" of the new content ratings, and that another iteration will be rolled out more broadly in late 2024.

Nielsen One Content incorporate's Nielsen watermarking service Gracenote's identity data, enabling "unified measurement of programs across platforms and the integration of rich metadata to provide context to audience measurement," Nielsen stated.