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

 

 

Navigating a Brave New Measurement World with Nielsen’s Karthik Rao

Although it sounds more like science fiction, we are now in a world where consumers can expand time. Well, at least in terms of overall hours of media usage. With more media platforms and only so many hours in a day, “consumers are spending more time overall on media,” explained Karthik Rao, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Nielsen Global Media. 

His keynote at the recent Data Conference at TV Week 2019 focused on the expansion of media options, how it impacts viewer behavior and Nielsen’s role in ensuring that media usage is measured, explained and acted upon correctly.

Consumer Media Usage is Growing Rapidly

Twenty-six years ago in 2003, U.S. adults spent an overall 50 hours a week on media – a combination of Radio, Live TV and TV Connected Devices and Digital Devices.  Ten years later, in 2013, it increased +18% to 59 hours and, just six years later in 2019, it ballooned +38% to 82 hours per week. The daily time spent from 2018 to 2019 grew +13% from 10:24 hours per day to 11:45 per day, combining nine different platforms. Does anyone ever sleep anymore?

Of course, with only so much time in a day, this impressive growth in usage means more multi-tasking is taking place as well as, Rao noted that we now have the ability to “access media when and where we might not have been able to before.” Easy access to content on, for example, a smartphone, enables someone to fill in the gaps of waiting time by engaging in content.

Enrich, Understand and Respect the Consumer

“Consumers are willing to expand time,” Rao noted, “because there are more choices.”  For Nielsen, that means that, “we have to fundamentally enrich, understand and respect the consumer experiences, with the biggest word being respect.” To Rao, this means not having the viewer, “going to every single platform and getting same damn ad over and over. It is disrespectful.” He added, “People can’t handle that many ads. They tune out.”

For Nielsen, there are five monetization opportunities for media spend including Tradition Reach Advertising through Linear, Targeted Advertising with Audience Buys, No Advertising such as with SVOD, Branded Integration such as Product Placement and Trade Marketing which hit $1 trillion globally. Measurement of these options must include the correct coverage, inclusion of all necessary data points and diversity representation of audience in order to measure total audience. And it must cover all platforms. “We look for next way that time can expand,” he stated. Nielsen’s role “is to organize all of that,” as well as understand the impact of reach and frequency, the next relevant metrics and track the consumer experience with multi-touch attribution to, “create a touch point and a metric between touch points.” The goal is simple - Measure total audience, Measure outcomes and Expand globally.

The Changing Nature of Media Measurement

In a business that has historically sold on GRPs based on age and gender, the move to impressions-based selling is a notable change. Nielsen, according to Rao, supports this move towards impressions. “Anything that helps seller and buyer make sense of their transactions,” he explained. But, “Consumer experiences are about people and impressions are not people. We need to recognize this. We want to raise the bar on what we are trying to solve and when you do, the role of each data point changes and you use it differently. Change is a good thing and we want to be a part of it,” he concluded.

Managing the torrent of data is as much of an art as a science. For Rao it has to begin with following the money. “Use it as roadmap,” he advised, “Things become clearer. Money begins with the advertisers.” From there, ask yourself, “What is the persona? What is the advertiser or brand trying to solve for?” In fact, he recommended that we focus on the roles that different dataset play in either depth or breath. “It is less about tech,” he noted, “What is the problem you are trying to solve? And what is the value of the data?”

As far as C3 is concerned, “it worked really well for a long time but it is a blunt metric. It doesn’t tell you what happened within any commercial pod. So it’s not great for engagement.”  But when you get down to the individual ad as you can do in digital, one gets closer to engagement.

Rao defended the use of panels. “Our conviction on the role of the panel is stronger now,” he said, “because of fragmentation. You have to understand the differences in platforms. If don’t get it right you can’t solve big data problems. So a truth set is most important. One media truth is the panel. We use it to ideate every piece of data.” Set top box, he admitted, can be used to enhance the panel because it plays into the dynamic of small and big data synergies. “Small data enriches big data. Big data expands small data. Don’t confuse relationship,” he advised.  

In short, the media ecosystem needs to, “move beyond a campaign-based view of the world.” In a world of the small and big glass screens, “the business model is not the same. But we need some common way to bring them together. That is how TV works,” he concluded, “It’s always on.” Maybe that is why we consumers don’t sleep anymore.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com