Consolidation and Collaboration in the Audience Marketplace

There were a couple of high profile developments in the audience measurement industry this week that will likely have profound implications for how audiences are measured and valued in the years to come. First came Nielsen and Twitter’s announcement that the two companies would be collaborating on a new metric — a “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” for television programs.  Then came the announcement from Nielsen and Arbitron that Nielsen would be acquiring the radio audience measurement firm in a cash and stock deal.

Nielsen, Social Guide and the Merger of Old and New Approaches to TV Audience Measurement

An inevitable development took place this week in the evolving television audience marketplace, with Nielsen acquiring social TV analytics start-up Social Guide.

Recent Developments in the Post-Exposure Audience Marketplace

We’re in the midst of Advertising Week here in New York, which provides an interesting lens into how the audience marketplace is reacting to the ongoing changes in how consumers use media, and in how this usage can be measured.

An International Nielsen Scandal?

This week, New Delhi Television Limited, India’s oldest and largest news network, filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court, alleging that the Nielsen Company and its partner in India, Kantar Media Research, have been receiving bribes in exchange for rampant manipulation of television viewership data.  The lawsuit also contends that similar activities are taking place in places such as Turkey, the Phillipines, and here in the U.S. (specifically, Florida).  The full 196-page complaint can be found here.

The Death of the Diary? Not Quite

It’s an often-forgotten fact of television audience measurement that Nielsen still measures 15o of the 210 U.S. television markets using nothing more sophisticated than old-fashioned paper diaries.  According to an announcement from Nielsen yesterday, that might finally be starting to change.

New Media, New Demand Measurement Methodologies

The Audience Evolution blog has unfortuantely been on the back burner the past couple of months as I’ve been drowning in a number of other obligations. But I am finally reaching the light at the end of the tunnel and so will be returning to this on a regular basis in the weeks to come.

The Many Facets of Online Audience Engagement

A common topic of this blog (as well as a point of focus of the Audience Evolution book) has been the concept of engagement, and how various stakeholders (measurement firms, advertisers, content providers, etc.) are working to create concrete defintions that can function as meaningful performance metrics (and perhaps, one day, currencies) in the audience marketplace.

The Evolution of an Online Audience Currency

As I’ve touched upon in previous posts, the online advertising space has yet to see the development of a single, mutually agreed-upon currency along the same lines of what we have in television with the C3 rating.  We might finally see such a currency emerging in the wake of Unilever’s just-announced agreement with Nielsen to use their Online Campaign Ratings for all of their online advertising buys in the U.S.

 

The Evolution of Political Audience Analysis

A number of years ago I started (but eventually abandoned, for reasons I can’t remember) a project examining the dynamics of political media buying.  One of the consistent themes that emerged in the early stages of this project was the extent to which political media buying was years behind commercial media buying in terms of the analytical tools and data employed.  And as a result, traditional media channels (e.g., broadcast television) were relied upon far more extensively than more targeted, and presumably more efficient, channels such as local cable and the internet.

The Latest Strategies for Gaming the TV Ratings System

As long as there have been audience ratings, there have been efforts by content providers to manipulate those ratings by exploiting the particular dynamics of how the data are gathered and reported (I talk about this a bit in my 2003 book, Audience Economics). Last week the New York Times ran an interesting piece describing some of the current efforts by national television networks to game television ratings in the era of the C3.