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We’ve all heard the quote from the department store owner who complained that half of his advertising dollars were wasted, but he didn’t know which half. Today, an advertiser can choose from about a dozen different video measurement services, all of which claim they can tell who’s watching and when.
Nielsen, the granddaddy of ratings services, started out measuring radio audiences in the 1920s. The company switched to television in the 1950s. When there were only a handful of video viewing options and a limited number of screens in a household, the company’s combination of technology and paper diaries from a select number of households made sense.
Today’s consumers have a plethora of viewing options including TVs, tablets, smartphones and other devices accessing over-the-air (OTA), cable/multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and streaming/over-the-top (OTT). Choices can include both linear offerings and on-demand content.
Given all this complexity, it’s reasonable to question whether Nielsen’s sample size of 42,000 homes, which have a total estimated 120,000 televisions, can accurately represent the actual viewing experiences of 122.4 million U.S. television households when inhabitants have access to so many different devices.
Video ad measurement fidelity questions really came to the forefront during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. The commonly accepted understanding that people were staying home and watching more television wasn’t being reflected in Nielsen’s numbers. After repeatedly denying problems with its measurements, Nielsen admitted that viewership, both in homes and in public spaces, had been undercounted for about a year.
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