Nielsen and clypd Collaborate to Advance Audience-Based Buying

At the recent TVB Forward conference, Steve Hasker, Global President and Chief Operating Officer, Nielsen, noted that more transparency and accountability was needed in measurement. With Nielsen’s recent announcement of a collaboration with clypd, a leading audience-based sales platform to network television ad sales organizations, there is now a greater ability according to the press release to, “enable buyers to seamlessly share their media plans and the audience segments created via Nielsen’s planning software… with sellers through the clypd platform.”

What this means is that Nielsen is integrating its television ratings data into the clypd platform enabling advertising agencies to more efficiently execute on media plans based on custom audience segmentations. To enable advertisers to define custom segments, Nielsen is offering a range of proprietary consumer profile data, including Nielsen Catalina Solutions, MarketBreaks, Nielsen Buyer Insights, and Nielsen TV MRI Fusion. They are planning to offer services to estimate custom audience performance (for pricing and yield management) and fully steward sales contracts on these segments.

For clypd, this collaboration with Nielsen will scale and streamline advanced advertising contracts from beginning to end of a buy. Jason Burke, Vice President Strategic Development, clypd explained, “The clypd platform (is) activating Nielsen data across the entire media workflow including planning, media buying and measurement of linear TV advertising.“

I was curious to know how this all worked and asked Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President Watch Product Leadership for Nielsen, the following questions:

Charlene Weisler: Is this initiative for both local and national markets?

Kelly Abcarian: We will initially focus on national cable and broadcast networks but are assessing demand for a similar solution in Local markets. Nielsen already has plans to launch our Nielsen Media Impact (NMI) planning suite for Local television in early 2018. 

Weisler: Are buys fully stewarded through the sales process?

Abcarian: Yes through the clypd platform which now provides both Nielsen demographic and advanced audience delivery reporting and posting throughout the campaign lifecycle. This should allow media owners and agencies to steward buys to deliver upon audience guarantees. 

Weisler: Is this something that will be integrated into Adviews?

Abcarian: We are working are in the process of integrating the advanced segmentation performance data across our entire portfolio of offerings. We will continue to update the marketplace on our latest plans and roadmap.

Weisler: How many segments? Are they standardized? Can segments be customized and proprietary?

Abcarian: You can create an unlimited number of audience segmentations using combinations of attributes from Nielsen-collected, 3rd party and advertiser 1st party behavioral data. Through NMI, agencies can compose audience definitions using segments from a number of Nielsen data products, including Nielsen TV MRI Fusion, Nielsen Buyer Insights credit card spend data, MarketBreaks and Nielsen Catalina Solutions in-store loyalty data. With the integration built between clypd and Nielsen Marketing Cloud, digital segments can be activated on TV as well. Finally, marketers can use this client behavioral data for forecasting and optimization.

Weisler: Can you bring in other data sets such as first party data or other syndicated datasets?

Abcarian: Yes. clypd’s platform enables the use of any data sets – beyond Nielsen’s - for forecasting, measurement, optimization, and stewardship/posting of advertising activity on television. Marketers are clamoring to activate their data within TV, but the process has been proven to be slow and painful, limiting the scale of this valuable data strategy.  Through this collaboration, we are streamlining this process to allow for leveraging various data segments including offline CRM data and digital behavioral data which can be matched against Nielsen TV viewership data as a foundation.  This unique workflow makes it possible to create advanced segments born from person level matches as opposed to household matches, common with STB or Smart TV data. 

Weisler: Is this or can this become cross platform?

Abcarian: This is a first step towards cross-screen advertising based on custom audience segmentations. With these pieces in place, clypd's forecasting and optimization and Nielsen's digital and TV measurement products will enable end-to-end advertising across screens as a subsequent offering for the market

Weisler: What is the basic metric used to post? delivery? Live +1? c3? All or any of these or others?

Abcarian: Audience posting and campaign performance is supported across any rating stream agreed upon by media owner and agency and for which the underlying data source includes measurement.

Weisler: Are the solutions from clypd & Nielsen focused on a particular type of client?

Abcarian: All of the product initiatives benefit both media company and media buyer by streamlining the buying process and enabling both sides to benefit from data-driven decisioning to improve their advertising efforts. The forecasting and posting services will open up tools for the buyers and sellers ecosystem, but also with incremental stakeholder groups like external advertising platforms, industry analysts and finance groups, by providing tools to best understand and manage their media and advertising efforts with advanced data sources.

Weisler: How does this collaboration break new ground?

Abcarian: The ramping activity in the past two upfront calendar years has positioned the market to be in a place to increase investments. For these investments to continue their upward trends, the market requires tools for empowering clients and media companies to fuel these industry shifts.  clypd and Nielsen’s collaboration streamlines integrations between the existing optimization tools and datasets being used  and creates new product offerings to help move the industry forward. These innovations bring advanced audience forecasting, pricing and stewardship/posting to the wider advertising ecosystem for the purposes of planning, executing and managing advanced audience deals, ultimately playing a key role in helping to accelerate the market adoption of these shifts.