New Year, New Nielsen
The beginning of a new year is often a time for big changes. New year’s resolutions, new exercise routines, new diets. For Nielsen Media Research, the start of 2025 brought about several significant changes.
First, on January 23, the Media Ratings Council (MRC) announced that it had granted full accreditation to Nielsen’s hybrid Big Data + Panel ratings for person-level estimates. That makes Big Data + Panel ratings the first hybrid measurement service that is accredited as a national TV currency. The Big Data + Panel measurement service combines Nielsen’s existing panel of meters in over 41,000 households with big data collected from over 45 million smart TVs and cable set-top boxes.
The hybrid service offers the best of both worlds. The big data set better captures the long-tail of fragmented TV viewing that can be missed in a panel with only 41,000 homes. It will also open the door for advertisers and media companies to trade on advanced audiences beyond the standard demographics that panel-only ratings are limited to. The panel provides an understanding of person-level viewership (Smart TVs and set-top boxes count screens, not viewers), it can balance some inherent audience bias in big data sets (younger, more affluent), and can better verify human viewership.
On the heels of the accreditation announcement, on February 3 both Nielsen and Paramount Global announced that they had come to terms and renewed their measurement contract. Paramount had been off Nielsen since their previous contract expired on September 30, 2024. The four-month contract dispute was the lengthiest of its kind for a media company the size of Paramount, and the lack of Nielsen ratings heading into the 2025-2026 upfront season had some in the industry questioning if this would blow open the alternative currency marketplace.
While the extended period of Paramount transacting on VideoAmp data gave us a hint of what a multi- currency marketplace could look like, the resolution just months before the upfront and just after some tentpole events on flagship CBS (NFL AFC Championship game, The Grammys) shows that Paramount wasn’t quite prepared to walk away from Nielsen. The new contract includes the Big Data + Panel data, which could be read as a vote of confidence from Paramount for the hybrid data model versus the big data only model of VideoAmp.
Ultimately, it is not the MRC or Nielsen that will decide how media buyers and sellers will transact their deals in this – and future – upfronts. Only buyers and sellers can agree on a common currency. At Rain the Growth Agency, we agree that the Big Data + Panel approach of Nielsen is the right direction for TV audience measurement, for all the “best of both worlds” reasons stated earlier. We also continue to work with and support all of the media measurement and currency alternatives to Nielsen, because the “new Nielsen” we are seeing today is a direct result of healthy marketplace competition from ComScore, iSpot, VideoAmp and others.
This article is featured in Media Impact Report No. 62. View the full report here.
