The television networks trade group is attacking Nielsen again, this time for its decision to publish audience estimates based on “big data” sources in addition to its old panel-based measurement service. The Video Advertising Bureau says the two sets of data offer conflicting currencies and asks the measurement giant to hold back on the new data until it has released more information about how it was created.
The two sets of currencies are traditional TV ratings from the Nielsen panel of 41,000 US households and a “big data” alternative that uses the display mined from set-top boxes and smart TVs and is part of the alpha version of Nielsen One, the cross-media measurement service still in development.
Nielsen said it made both datasets available for buying and selling in the fall based on market feedback. “Our approach will allow buyers and sellers to trade for big data and panel metrics if they choose, while giving our customers flexibility to adapt to this launch,” Nielsen says, as reported. Ad age.
In a publicly released letter to Nielsen CEO David Kenny, VAB Chairman and CEO Sean Cunningham said Nielsen should be required to “disclose in detail” information about how the data was created and what how to compare the two sets of data before “big data” television. measurement datasets can be considered “legitimate for possible use of TV currency data”.
“Nielsen’s limited documentation/disclosure has made analysis impossible for researchers and data scientists, adding to a large volume of inexplicable differences between Big Data and panel datasets,” Cunningham says in the letter.
According to the VAB letter, the first set of set-top box and smart TV audience estimates published by Nielsen are “riddled with illogical audience patterns and contradictions” that render them unusable.
In his response to the VAB, Nielsen said he was “deeply disappointed” that the trade group raised their concerns in the press instead of having “a direct discussion and collaboration with us”. The measurement company said it is in regular contact with clients, including hosting webinars and client meetings, to review the methodology used to create the audience data.
Also, Nielsen suggests that the VAB might have some of its own biases since it only represents TV networks and not the entire video market. “A trade group associated with traditional television channels is an incomplete and biased subset of the video market,” Nielsen said. “We prefer to work openly with the whole industry to find the best measurement solution.”
