Nielsen Unveils Real-Time Audience Visualization Tool: Leverages ACR For Minute-By-Minute TV Ratings

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, 9 hours ago

Nielsen continues to diversify its portfolio of audience measurement products beyond its core “currency” ratings, including a new one being unveiled this morning that enables users to analyze local market or national TV ratings in real-time.

The new service, dubbed Nielsen Grabix, correlates minute-by-minute audience ratings from Nielsen’s conventional TV ratings samples and methods with real-time data from Gracenote, the meta data and ACR (automatic content recognition) measurement platform Nielsen acquired last year.

The acquisition of Gracenote effectively was Nielsen’s ACR play, providing a hedge for a promising way of measuring audiences and content consumption as so-called smart TVs -- or connected TV devices -- gain critical mass. Like similar deals Nielsen has done to diversify its portfolio to include non-traditional audience measurement methods and technologies -- such as digital set-top data, or data management platform (DMP) eXelate -- Nielsen is walking a delicate tightrope between its monopolistic control of traditional currency ratings and newer, pragmatic methods that leverage so-called “Big Data.”

Grabix, effectively, combines the best of both worlds, enabling users to overlay Nielsen’s minute-by-minute ratings to visualize how content -- and advertising -- perform in real-time programming environments.

Unfortunately, Nielsen did not provide RI with data to render an analysis, but it did give us a preview and you can visualize how the service works in the accompanying screenshot. This one shows a real-time view of minute-by-minute performance in the Prime Access daypart for local stations in the New York market.

Another version of the product enables users to view similar snapshots based on historical data.

The most immediate application is more for stations, networks, programmers and producers to understand the competitive dynamics of their programming’s peformance in real-time or over time, but there likely are some innovative and imaginative applications for advertisers and agencies who want to visualize the impact of lead-ins, lead-outs, pod positions, etc., have on the performance of their TV ads in a real-world and real-time audience viewership setting.