As the year winds down, I think it would be apt to say that 2024 was the "Year of Attention Metrics" -- at least as far as the ad industry's research intelligencers are concerned, if not its media planners and buyers.
And based on news breaking this morning, it is …
Joe, as I read between the lines on the Nielsen deal, it seems to be oriented mainly to qualitative measurements using small samples to evaluate the ad impact/attentivenss of program contexts and other generally applicable variables---but not to incorprate attentiveness as a standard metric for specific TV show by show ratings--as the sellers are dead set against that and they call the shots. Nielsen may also be gettng ready for a time-- off in the future---when advertisers wise up and demand that TV audiences are defined by attentiveness---in particular to commercials. But we aren't close to that as yet.
@Ed Papazian: Difficult for me to say what the orientation is, but it isn't sample-based measurement. Realeyes describes it as "a growing truth set of more than 17 million human observations, mapping attention and emotion to more than 350 billion frames of video."
Based on this announcement, I don't believe Nielsen plans to incorporate it as a standard metric for media measurement, only as an outcome metric for measuring the performance of ads (ie. creative).