Paul Ballew, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at the NFL, took multiple shots at Nielsen on Tuesday, accusing the ratings giant of “under-counting” viewership for many of the league’s game telecasts.
In particular, Ballew faulted the measurement of “tentpole” events like Thanksgiving Day games and the Super Bowl, which are viewed by large numbers of people crowded around TV screens.
Speaking on a media conference call that featured other league execs, Ballew said Nielsen uses a “co-viewing factor” of 2.3 to 2.4 times the number of households tuning in. To use a hypothetical example, that means that if a game drew 10 million households, Nielsen extrapolates that to mean that 23 million or 24 million viewers were actually watching.
Over the years, Ballew said, the league has “raised issues” with that methodology. It believes the multiple “doesn’t make sense” given research it has conducted with third parties like the University of Chicago. The NFL maintains that a more accurate co-viewing number would be a multiple of 2.8 or 2.9. The discrepancy between the league and Nielsen equates to as many as 15 million to 20 million extra viewers for the Super Bowl, Ballew said.
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“We don’t have a fix right now for it,” Ballew said. “We’ve evaluated through other alternatives as well, and we’re still working through that. It’s more along the lines right now than when we look at from a survey standpoint, it appears to be under-reporting.”
Networks and advertisers, especially during the past streaming-centric decade, have lamented the sluggish progress of Nielsen. The firm has been the dominant provider of ratings since the medium of television was born, but critics have said it operates as a de facto monopoly and therefore has not prioritized innovation. As the entity behind nearly all of the 100 top-rated broadcasts of the year for the past several years, the NFL has leverage. But despite years of occasionally noisy complaints, Nielsen ratings remain the main currency on which tens of billions of dollars of advertising deals are struck each year.
Nielsen, whose CEO, Karthik Rao, took the top job in 2023 after the company was taken private, earlier Tuesday rolled out a new measurement system to launch this fall. The company’s Big Data + Panel National TV Measurement setup combines traditional panel measurement with data from cable, satellite set-top boxes and smart TVs spanning some 45 million households and 75 million devices. The company cautioned that it will likely take longer to generate accurate ratings, so in most cases a next-day figure will be more like a “two or three days later” number.
While Ballew gave Nielsen credit for taking “a big step forward” with the new data-plus-panel system, he said the conversations around revising game methodology remain stalled. “The dilemma we have with all that, though, is it’s a very protracted journey with Nielsen,” he said. “We can’t get them out of neutral to really progress down the road.”
A number of challenger firms have risen up in recent years to try to compete with Nielsen in the ratings derby, and as a strategic move some firms have promoted their deals with newer measurement firms like VideoAmp or iSpot. Asked during the call for an opinion about VideoAmp, which worked with Paramount to provide ratings for NFL games and other programs during a contract dispute with Nielsen, Ballew said the NFL was “intrigued” by the firm’s measurement offerings.