COMMENTARY

The Futility of Media Measurement

• by Ed DeNicola , Op-Ed Contributor, 8 hours ago

Less than a week after it was announced that Comscore had lost Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for its Media Metrix digital desktop audience measurement service, the MRC announced it had reinstated accreditation for Nielsen's national TV measurement service. How’s that for timing? Hit ‘em while they’re down just before the upfront season.

The two companies have been battling it out for years. Before Comscore, it was Nielsen vs. Arbitron and we all know how that story ended. In fact, for many years Comscore was run by a CEO who was a former Arbitron executive. He is currently its vice chairman.

Nielsen has been taking a huge amount of heat for underreporting ratings during the pandemic. Apparently, it should have made its field representatives man-up and get those sample homes back online. COVID death and intubation be damned, dollars are being exchanged based on its estimates.

Perhaps this description is too glib. However, there is much truth to it. The pandemic caused problems no company could have expected to confront. Nielsen probably did not adequately communicate the situation to clients. Its employees were likely too timid to say anything. This isn’t an excuse, but you can certainly see how it could happen.

As for the impacted TV network clients, they already were losing audiences to digital streaming services and their business models are under duress. Audiences from their own new digital streaming services haven’t been enough to replace lost linear viewing. You can understand why they were so upset. It added to an already bad set of circumstances.

The pandemic problem isn’t the only criticism Nielsen is facing. There is also the issue that Nielsen has been too slow to add viewing from digital TV sources into its numbers. They haven’t been able to count everything. As a result, there are some very angry sell-side customers who are making life extremely difficult for the company, including an effort to implement a joint industry committee (JIC) like those in other countries.

Well, not exactly like other countries, where JICs review available measurement offerings and pick one to provide its ad industry currency for some agreed length of time. If implemented in the U.S., this would give the industry a great deal of control over measurement. It could even attempt to oust Nielsen by choosing a different vendor.

Unfortunately for Nielsen, it’s the clients who experience negative consequences that are most vocal. Even if proposed changes are methodological improvements, its clients can get upset. To make things worse its clients’ motivation isn’t always about research accuracy, it can be about winning vs. losing and about how much money they can charge for ads.

Worst of all, clients who benefit from the changes don’t often step in to quiet the situation or defend Nielsen.

Negatively impacted clients can go to great lengths to pressure Nielsen. Does anyone remember Fox’s grassroots “Don’t Count Us Out” campaign, which claimed Nielsen didn’t properly count minorities back in the 90s? That Nielsen client involved local and national politicians including Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton. It was a major headache for Nielsen’s management.

The problem had to do with the rollout of local people meters and how sample homes were chosen. If you owned or worked for a TV network that had a large amount of minority viewing, the inclusion or exclusion of minority homes would disproportionately impact your ratings. For the record, no researcher worth a salt would ever dispute that the people meter methodology was not better than dairies.

The truth is that Nielsen isn’t slow to innovate because it lacks talent, creativity, and motivation. It is slow because it has a diverse client base.

Methodological improvements cause change, and the consequences aren’t often evenly dispersed. There tends to be some numbers that go up and some that go down. As a result, there are groups of Nielsen clients who are positively impacted, and other groups that have negative consequences. Some clients will the want the changes and others will object. This creates logjams that can go on for some time, while little gets done and time accumulates. All of this while the claim that Nielsen is slow to innovate is reinforced in the minds of its client base.

Does anyone think for a second that any of this will be different if Nielsen were replaced by another company? The new company would be in the same predicament Nielsen is in. The players and dynamics will not have changed.

Methodological improvements will still cause inequitable outcomes. There will still be winners and losers. The losers will still be more vocal, and the winners will still be just as quiet. The losers won’t be any more altruistic in their motivations. The lack of forward movement resulting from negatively affected clients’ objections to changes will still be a problem. More won’t get done and time will still add up.

The new company would now be criticized for being slow to innovate instead of Nielsen. Media measurement will not have improved, only the name of the research firm will have changed. At some point the new research company would succumb to the same dynamics that befell Nielsen. It will be overtaken by another newer research firm and the cycle will start all over again. 

This is the futility of media measurement