LAS VEGAS – The biggest takeaway to date from Nielsen’s work with Roku in examining the connected device landscape is that it’s a lot like linear television, given the amount of co-viewing that takes place. “If you looked at the connected device landscape and all you looked at is the server counts coming off of those machines, you would be under counting the audience size,” says Kelly Abcarian, Nielsen’s SVP of Product Leadership.
In an interview with Beet.TV at the global measurement company’s annual Consumer 360 conference, Abcarian shares the results of a series of studies showing that across 15 campaigns, there was an average of 34% of co-viewing on Roku devices. “This is very similar to the television environment, where we see more than one person viewing a certain type of programming, whether it’s sports, children’s programming, reality TV or game shows,” Abcarian says.
Nielsen and Roku began working together in the spring of 2015. Abcarian calls Roku “a great first partner” given its registration data that, when combined with Nielsen’s metered data, has the potential to bring “a digital ad rating metric, currency grade, on connected devices the same way we do for PC and mobile to life.”
This month, Nielsen will be able to measure all digital ad campaigns on Roku devices across every ad-supported channel that wants to be measured, the same way that it produces overnight ad ratings for digital and mobile. The work that Nielsen did to understand co-viewing via Roku and take device-level impressions and “gross this up to audience is a game changer for the industry,” Abcarian says.
This video is part of series produced at Consumer 360. The series is sponsored by Nielsen. Please visit this page for additional segments.
