The Audience is Everything. Nielsen Announces Nielsen One Cross-Media Solution

We are fortunate to be involved in the time of the great expansion of media. But with this great expansion comes measurement challenges and Nielsen has been grappling with how to calculate cross platform behavior so that it can be an independent measurement on a single platform. 

Their solution is the recently launched Nielsen One which is, according to David Kenny, Nielsen’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Diversity Officer, “a single cross-media solution to drive comparable and comprehensive metrics across all platforms.”

Nielsen One is Announced

“What started out as just television and movies has now grown into a multi-platform cross media landscape, bigger than anyone ever anticipated,” explained Kenny. “Consumers are no longer limited to engaging with video content at as particular time and place. They now have endless options for viewing whatever and whenever they want to.” The endless choice of platforms, devices, mediums and ad formats coupled with an increased commitment to privacy has led to a wealth of data from a range of sources that can often be duplicative. Nielsen One aims to solve for all of these exigencies. “With Nielsen’s cross-media solution, Nielsen One,” he asserted, “we are aiming to provide marketers, advertisers and publishers with a single metric, across digital and linear that is trusted, independent and standardized across the industry.”

In mapping out Nielsen One’s complete roll-out by 2024, Nielsen’s Chief Operating Officer, Karthik Rao, explained that while the industry is at a major inflection point with innovation, it has been accelerated by Covid. “The amount of disruption and innovation that we have experienced in the past nine months would normally happen over the course of a few years,” he noted. Between the fifteen new streaming services launched in the course of two years to the +33% increase in spend for addressable in one year and the push to full distribution of smart TVs where nearly 8 out of 10 homes have a least one, the industry’s expansion is taking place on many levels. Add to that is an increased focus on, “privacy restrictions, increased consumer awareness and regulatory changes. Digital ad tech, measurement, activation will be reborn in a world without reliable  persistent identifiers such as cookies  and mobile ad ids and there is a massive shift to streaming while  the walled garden walls are growing higher and the open web remains a question mark. These changes intensify the need for standard measurement and audience de-duplication,” he concluded.

Nielsen has already made great progress in cross-media measurement and this effort, through Nielsen One, is expected to ramp up over the next two years. “We are already evolving the national currency to include  addressable measurement in the first half of 2021,” Rao noted, “We are leveraging our own ACR data and announced the integration of data from Direct TV, Dish and Vizio’s Project OAR. Starting in late 2021, for live television, we will be previewing sub-minute ads and content metrics… In 2022 we will fully launch the cross-media product and expect the market to fully transition by the fall 2024 season.”

And The Industry Responds

For Luis di Como, Executive Vice President Global Media, Unilever, the need for a single cross-media solution is paramount. “One of the biggest advantages we have at Unilever is our coverage,” he explained, “If you see thought the lens of geography, portfolio and channels, we have millions of data points and signals that we can use to understand the future,” in a global marketplace. Today, Unilever boasts a People Data Center. “This is the place where we capture, store, analyze and leverage all of the data that we have from first party data to second and third party to get a holistic view of the consumer and to get unique insights,” he stated and added, “Covid accelerated that trend,” moving the markets from ecommerce to “e-everything,” creating that much more data to handle and changing consumer behaviors. One single measurement will enable companies like Unilever to mitigate waste and manage frequency resulting in optimizing company efforts and creating a better consumer experience.

Many companies have been working independently to find cross-media solutions. How can we best combine our efforts to get to an industry standard solution?  Michael Kassan, Founder Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Medialink, moderated a panel of executives from across the media industry. “We have made progress in the last year but … we need to move faster, marketers are getting frustrated, digital continues to grow,” he stated. Moving into 2021 and beyond, Kassan posited four major questions – How do we increase user engagement in advertising? How can we create new, more non-interruptive experiences that would be preferred by consumers and work for marketers? How do we make it easier for marketers to connect to the audiences that move their brand? How do we insure your messages are in front of the right viewer?

For Kirk McDonald, North America Chief Executive Officer, GroupM, “the challenges facing the industry will require us to work together and be more cooperative to make the industry function better,” and move towards single sources of measurement for video across all distribution platforms.

With an extremely diversified portfolio, Linda Yaccarino, Chairman Global Advertising and Partnerships, NBCU, believes that since the pandemic, “strategic priorities have changed dramatically. Did we anticipate, unfortunately the theme parks being largely closed down? Did we anticipate the studio business being what it is today? But additionally, did we anticipate the broadband business having extraordinary and meteoric growth with no anticipation of that slowing down?” Broadband, aggregation and streaming are now the new priorities to, “put the consumer at the core.” She added, that as the industry comes together with, “a common purpose for an open platform that is dedicated to safety and transparency, we can really make strides and get ahead to meet the consumer needs.”

Having worked on both the client and agency side, Ben Jankowski, Group Head of Global Media, Mastercard, has been quoted as saying, “The biggest decision we have to make as marketers is where we put our money.” This is a challenge that is not yet being solved by today’s measurement. “Today we can’t measure the holistic view of the consumer. Today, with the research challenge we have and the business realities of people in the marketplace who have built products that are not conducive to being comparable, we have fragmentation which is more difficult to measure than any time before. We have to get in front of it,” he admonished.

Tara Walpert Levy, Managing Director of Global Ads Marketing, Google, noted, “The viewer is all that matters. They define what television is. If you are a buyer, it is critical to have objective, comparable, independent measurement which buyers and sellers both have confidence in and that lets you operate at scale.”  For her, Nielsen One will make this process easier and impactful.

Kenny explained that Nielsen is hyper focused on solving this industry challenge. “Nielsen has been part of the challenge,” he admitted, “We have tried to measure everything historically in different methodologies so there was a digital ad rating, TV ad rating, cable rating. When I got here two years ago we did a complete overhaul to get to one id platform and the one ability to measure all of it in the same de-duplicated way. It is the only way we can solve this problem.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

Working Smart and Preparing for the Future with Nielsen’s David Kenny

Even before the pandemic made the media world an uncertain environment, the explosion of data sources and measurement needs were causing changes and disruptions. But now, with COVID-19 impacting lives, behaviors and businesses, the world of measurement and data collection needs to ascertain what the new normal will look like and how we can go forward.

David Kenny, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Diversity Officer, Nielsen, shared his perspectives on the media landscape in a fascinating MediaVillage Collective Leadership Conversation with Jack Myers. Kenny is an early pioneer in digital with a career that has spanned agencies, networks to technology and data. His current work at Nielsen is an eclectic mix of data, technology and human resources development that, as he explained, will enable Nielsen to “work smart.”

Kenny, as well as others at Nielsen, understands the need to move the industry forward and maintain a leadership position in measurement. But it is not easy. He explained that, “When you are the industry currency and you advance that currency forward, you have some people who lean in and some it affects in a negative way.” He is charged with bringing Nielsen’s innovations to the next level in a massively changing media environment that is becoming, “digital first, streaming first platform.”

The Workplace Shift During COVID-19

How can a company that was launched during the Depression to measure CPG pivot successfully during normal times and now during extraordinary times? “In order to do that I need to allocate resources to the highest opportunity,” Kenny explained, “and the most important resources I allocate are human beings’ amazing talent.” Under his direction, employees are expected to, “contribute to their fullest potential.” Some of this disconnect was the workplace environment, he conceded. Now, with a new work environment, he wants to be able to, “give everyone the best chance to impact the business,” which is why he took on the personal responsibility as Chief Diversity Officer, “to ensure everyone here can bring their whole self to work and contribute their whole self to the work they are doing,”

Interestingly, Kenny noted that the pandemic has shifted the workplace dynamic as more employees work from home, leading to his reassessment of the need for office space. But, he realizes that this has greater ramifications than just square foot rent. “It affects a lot of things because it is not just real estate. If less people are in an office that affects restaurants and public transportation,” he explained.  Yet, until we can be assured that it is safe to be in an office, Kenny remains on the side of caution and Nielsen will adapt to that. Interestingly, Kenny has not been a fan of remote work but has since revised his opinion. “When everybody works this way, we are actually cognizant about everybody being up on the grid view, calling on everybody. We are actually making better, faster and more inclusive decisions in this environment than we were before.” He advocates being, “plan-full about a change of everybody. When everybody is doing this it makes sense. We call it ‘working smart’ … and it will change the way we work with clients as well.”

Measurement Quality During and Beyond COVID-19

Hardware that is pivotal to capturing data sometimes breaks down. How is that handled during a pandemic? According to Kenny, “the quality metric (in-tab rate) in the last two months is at an all-time high. The Nielsen families around the world have risen to the occasion to say, ‘this work matters.’ Their votes matter. They are working with us to keep things operational.”  Nielsen is finding ways to fix meter lapses by troubleshooting remotely with panelists. Sometimes it is just a matter of, “hitting the reset button or put in a new HDMI cable or reset their router.” Kenny added that the MRC has been monitoring this process and has given their seal of approval on it. “I see no issues at all with our ability to get this done because our field organization literally turned, over a weekend, completely how they work,” he concluded.

In data, planning ahead has always been important but never more so than the unpredictable now. “How can you predict that campaign will have that result?” he asked. “It’s great for me to talk about the value of advertising and brand building but those are big investments that CFOs have to look at a period of tight cash flow. I think those decisions will be made with good probabilistic work.”  Kenny explained that when he worked in Weather, they predicted based on probability. “We managed to get 3 billion people a day to make decisions based 80% likelihood of rain or20% likelihood of a hurricane in your location.” What this bodes for Nielsen in an age of attribution is, “giving people a forward view. We measure backwards, we measure what’s happening and then predict the future.” This is a seismic change for Nielsen which has always been a strictly objective data provider. “The more we’re comfortable acting on high probabilities, the smarter we are going to be,” he stated.

Maintaining and Accelerating Innovation

Kenny advocates for encouraging innovation from all levels of the business and has been engaged in what he called, “the Founder Mentality, making sure that everyone at Nielsen thought about the business the way Arthur Nielsen would have thought about it.” This idea launched into an internal campaign called, “Find Your Inner Arthur,” where employees post their innovation ideas on the company’s intranet.

One fascinating area of innovation is the introduction of the nanometer as a replacement for the current hardware to better address the rapid acceleration of streaming consumption. The small and compact nanometer is designed to facilitate a single origination point for cross platform data collection instead of the current process of measuring via parallel panels where the data must be merged. “We are actually able to have a total view of the total audience. Getting one meter that can do everything and have one panel for all of the parts of Nielsen is where we are going.”

This, along with a full range of other innovations in upgraded technology and understanding streaming, was being developed prior to the pandemic with an expected launch data of 2021 and 2022. “We made the decision to go faster, to work with the MRC and auditors Ernst and Young to make sure we advance the industry currency quicker,” he explained, “We pulled things forward.” In fact, the impact of the pandemic has moved things forward much more quickly.

COVID-19 Usage and Media Business Trends

When it comes to programming, Kenny sees an interesting, understandable spike in local news consumption across all platforms, especially in-home. “As folks are dealing with a pandemic, it’s almost like a weather crisis – you go back to local. You want to understand what is happening in your community,” he explained, “There is a lot of trust. It feels de-politicized.” There is also more, “comfort viewing with resurgence in old shows,” and a great adaption by sports networks which are airing, “classic, epic games,” and, “the spectacular,” NFL draft coverage.

Nielsen, as the industry currency, works with both buyers and sellers. Now, the need to better understand changing consumer behavior is critical to the future of the business. “The buyers, the agencies and their client are trying to understand what is going on with the end consumer, not just what she is watching but the mindset,” Kenny noted. So the focus is on attribution in a higher use and much more fragmented viewing environment and, “how we connect that attribution back to the media plans.” Further, it goes without saying that all of this information needs to be easily accessible and easy to use for working from home.

On the sell side, the challenge for the media owners during this unusual upfront is to figure out, “how to value their total portfolio, how to make it to the point that they are selling through this fragmentation, that the content is breaking through and how to get all of the Nielsen data baked into some really advanced media selling systems.”  No matter what side of the business you are on, Kenny sees that the industry is facing the realization that, “we might have to do this – run this whole economy from home for a long time, maybe for a whole other year.”

For both sides of the business equation Nielsen plays a crucial role in making the economy work. “Measuring independently by a third party in the same way so that you can trust each other is going to be key,” he added, “Maintaining trust in the system at a point where we have seen unprecedented cancellations … is a starting point.”

Maintaining Optimism

Kenny referred to the past to fuel his optimism for the future. “More patents were filed right during and after the Great Depression and right after WW2 than ever and so we will get to this point where innovation will really matter and those innovations need to be communicated at scale to people. There will be a solution here… and advertising plays such an important role. You don’t see a really strong economy built without brand building advertising.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com