TV ad measurement looked for a new currency in 2022, but no one new has ascended the throne just yet.
After Nielsen lost its accreditation for local and national TV ratings in 2021, alternate measurement currencies saw an opening. They made their presence known in this year’s TV upfronts, and connected TV advertisers started putting real money behind them.
2022 will also be remembered for the streaming wars that ensued when Netflix and Disney+ decided to go AVOD, which added more heat and fervor to the measurement race.
Nielsen, the TV ratings giant, spent the year trying to get its cross-channel measurement platform, Nielsen ONE, out the door.
And, of course, the measurement plot twist of the year: Companies desperate for cogent TV measurement started turning back to panels for help.
It’s a classic tale of everything old is new again. But, like the future of TV viewing, the story isn’t linear.
Alternate reality
In early 2022, the alt currency competition started out more like a cat fight.
The CEOs of contending currencies debated the point of panels and the importance of third-party accreditation at industry events. Currency providers wooed buyers and sellers into adopting their measurement tools. Venture capitalists opened their wallets to provide funding.
NBCUniversal led the pack of programmers in its methodical search for an alternative.
NBCU, a longtime naysayer of Nielsen panels as a justifiable form of cross-channel measurement, started its measurement framework in 2021, when it sent requests for proposals to over 100 measurement companies. And, in January, it crowned iSpot.tv as its first official alt currency partner.
But no one wants another Nielsen-like monopoly. Programmers all insist the industry will need more than just one currency.
The race continues.
Alt currencies built up their own unique value props. VideoAmp focused on automating reporting and measuring in-program viewership fluctuations, while iSpot leaned into cross-screen and digital out-of-home attribution and automatic content recognition (ACR).
In November, NBCU created a new “Currency Council” with its advertisers who committed to using alt currencies for at least a portion of their media spend. (The new program currently has a dozen buy-side partners.)
NBCU also released a measurement vendor comparison to score iSpot, VideoAmp and Comscore, including where they fall short.
For example, NBCU ranked VideoAmp higher than iSpot for its planning tools, data clean room environment, advanced audiences and advanced audience guarantees. On the flip side, iSpot scored points for demo audiences, demo-based guarantees and cross-screen attribution.
Nielsen, meanwhile, is still hard at work on its comeback.
Where the heck is Nielsen ONE?
While a new measurement standard is up in the air, Nielsen remains a currency for many advertisers and programmers.
Nielsen’s revamped measurement platform, Nielsen ONE, entered alpha testing last year and is slated for release this month.
But leading up to this new product release, Nielsen was taken off the public market in March, when it agreed to a $16 million buyout to a private-equity consortium. The ownership shakeup increased doubt about Nielsen’s durability in the measurement market – particularly around how long Nielsen ONE is taking.
“Nielsen ONE is great on paper – but it’s already late,” Bharad Ramesh, GroupM’s executive director of research and investment analytics, told AdExchanger at the time. Publishers and advertisers are done waiting. “They’re diversifying more time and more resources away from Nielsen.”
Still, Nielsen assured the industry that Nielsen ONE is coming.
Over the summer, Nielsen launched its Four-Screen Ad Deduplication tool as part of its Total Ad Ratings (TAR) to deduplicate ad exposures on connected TV from linear, mobile and desktop. (Roku signed on in September.)
The new product will form the backbone of Nielsen ONE. Importantly, it indicates Nielsen, too, is shifting to impression-based over panel-based measurement for CTV.
But who will preside over the product?
Just this month – Nielsen’s self-imposed deadline for Nielsen ONE – Ad Age reported that an internal business reorg caused five of nine senior managers to leave the company, including chief data and research officer Mainak Mazumdar, the head of Nielsen ONE.
Programmers might just be left waiting for Godot.
Panel palooza
Media executives spent 2022 poking fun at panel-based TV measurement.
But, ironically, measurement companies spent the latter half of 2022 working on TV measurement solutions using … panels.
These aren’t audience panels – they’re calibration panels, thank you very much.
Unlike Nielsen’s audience panel, calibration panels solve for very specific attribution use cases, and they’re not meant to be used as a stand-alone measurement currency.
The Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) and VIZIO both announced panels that overlay automatic content recognition (ACR) with audience data to personify TV ad exposures, iSpot.tv led venture funding for panel provider TVision to gain exclusive access to its ACR viewership data, and Samba TV just acquired an AI startup last month to bolster its ACR measurement chops.
TV measurement providers like iSpot and Samba are scrambling to get hands on as much ACR data as humanly possible for one reason: It’s device-level data that substantiates panel data and pairs with big census-level data sets to match and verify ad impressions at the household level.
The term “panel” is becoming contentious. The companies building panels will all cringe if you compare their panels to Nielsen. And the sensitivity goes both ways. The day after the VAB announced its panel, Nielsen revealed the size of its “streaming meter panel” for the first time just to prove a point.
Panels might be “out” as a stand-alone currency, but they’re far from dead.
Cleaning up measurement
Aside from repurposing panels, programmers are also clamoring for more data interoperability while they wait for new TV currencies to materialize.
Enter clean rooms. Both NBCUniversal and Disney launched a clean room after Nielsen lost its accreditation last year, and over the year they bolstered their clean rooms with new partners and capabilities.
NBCUniversal dubbed Omnicom Media Group the first agency to access its clean room. Disney partnered with VideoAmp to connect its first-party IDs with the measurement provider’s viewership data. Not to be left out, Roku also launched its own data clean room for measurement and attribution.
First-party data matching is a major plus for programmers, but the privacy-safe value prop of data clean rooms is arguably just as important.
Privacy regulation is flooding into ad tech, and TV is no exception. IP addresses, when defined as PII, are in imminent danger. And there’s good reason to believe privacy concerns will start to enter the ACR data conversation, too, because ACR could potentially tie viewership history to a device ID (which is illegal under the Video Privacy Protection Act without the proper consent).
2022 was the year TV measurement reincarnated. But could 2023 be the year that measurement finally matures?
