(Stock image via Pixabay, Graphic by The Desk)
(Stock image via Pixabay, Graphic by The Desk)
Key Points:
One NFL executive says Nielsen misrepresents the viewership of its football games, especially on streaming platforms.
The NFL has experimented with alternative measurement solutions that compete with Nielsen.
Some broadcasters, including CBS and Nexstar, have also criticized Nielsen’s audience measurement in the past.
A key executive with the National Football League (NFL) has spoken publicly about the shortcomings of Nielsen’s television measurement practices, joining a growing number of broadcasters that have done the same over the past few years.
In a media briefing on Tuesday, NFL Chief Data and Analytics Officer Paul Ballew said Nielsen’s historical reliance on panel-based measurement has under-represented the audience of its biggest games, in large part because Nielsen has been slow to address a consumer shift from broadcast and cable TV to streaming platforms.
This season, all NFL games will be available to football fans via streaming services that are different from a traditional cable bundle. Games aired on NBC, CBS and ESPN have been available via streaming for a few years, but Fox games were largely relegated to streaming services that bundled channels together similar to cable. This week, Fox will begin offering its Sunday afternoon NFL games through its Fox One streamer, which costs $20 per month.
Some streaming services work with Nielsen to integrate their audience count into the company’s “Big Data + Panels” measurement solution, which uses a mixture of Nielsen’s traditional TV panels — a pre-selected group of households used to represent what most Americans are watching on broadcast and cable — and direct reporting from pay television and streaming partners.
“The measurement movement that Nielsen has taken to go to Big Data + Panel is something we strongly support,” Ballew said on Tuesday. “We’ve been pushing that very hard for the last couple of years, all the way through the accreditation process, because we view it as a step forward.”
A number of streaming services and connected TV platforms participate in Big Data + Panel, including Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network and Roku. Others have chosen to partner with Nielsen and other measurement firms that allow for the development of alternative media currencies — the value by which advertising is sold against traditional linear TV and streaming. Comscore and VideoAmp are examples of alternative measurement firms that some stakeholders, including the NFL, have used in addition or as an alternative to Nielsen.
While Ballew was somewhat complementary to Nielsen’s progress in his media briefing on Tuesday, he was a bit more direct in his criticism of the measurement firm in an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Flint, during which he accused Nielsen of undercounting “millions of viewers” who tune in to NFL games on broadcast, cable and streaming each week.
He is not alone in his criticism: Two years ago, Nexstar Media Group issued a press release announcing an open request for proposals to help it find “a next-generation audience measurement partner.” Nexstar is the largest independent owner of affiliated major-network broadcast TV stations — many of its outlets are affiliated with ABC, CBS, Fox or NBC — and is also a majority owner of the CW Network, which has a programming relationship with the NFL.
“We believe current methods of audience measurement inadequately reflect our national reach and the effectiveness of the local activation we deliver to advertisers and marketers,” Michael Strober, then-Chief Revenue Officer at Nexstar, said in a statement. “We need to accelerate the pace of innovation in cross-platform measurement not just with national content, but with the content generated in every one of our local markets. We also must ensure that the best data is operational across the company.” (Strober left Nexstar last year.)
Paramount has also expressed concerns over Nielsen: The CBS broadcaster broke away from Nielsen last October after a contract to use its measurement data expired without a new agreement in place.
In a statement, a Paramount advertising executive accused Nielsen of raising its prices despite the company’s failure to address “the changing economic landscape of our industry.”
“Nielsen’s costs as a percentage of Paramount ad revenue have quintupled over significant parts of our business over the last years; in certain instances, Nielsen’s fees already exceed the total advertising revenue of the network being measured,” the Paramount executive said. “This has led us to conclude that the model, as proposed, is not workable, and that the cost structure requires re-engineering.”
The dispute between Paramount and CBS remained through the rest of the NFL season, which delayed the network’s reporting of viewership figures associated with football games aired on the network. (The NFL, which has a contract with Nielsen, reported CBS viewership figures for its games separately.) In February, Nielsen and Paramount reached a new agreement that expanded the measurement of viewers to Paramount’s streaming services Paramount Plus and Pluto TV.
With respect to the NFL, a Nielsen spokesperson noted that the organization is the only one accredited by the Media Ratings Council to evaluate viewership across traditional and streaming TV, and that improving its measurement tools and reporting “continues to be a top priority for us.”
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