Television networks whose programming is seen in such out-of-home venues as airports, restaurants and offices are getting a welcome lift from Nielsen. Lift as in the incremental size of OOH audiences beyond traditional ratings metrics.
Time Warner’s CNN and Turner Sports this week signed on for Nielsen’s OOH measurement service, which uses a panel of 77,000 people across the top 44 DMA’s to capture viewing that has typically gone uncounted.
“This really enables the industry as a whole to assign value to the audiences that are being captured and not currently tracked in the traditional ratings up to this point,” Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President, Product Leadership, Nielsen says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Under terms of the agreement with Nielsen, the Turner units will get viewership credit for both program and commercial ratings for up to seven days of viewing of various pieces of content, as Variety reports. CNN is the first news network to make use of the Nielsen technology. Disney’s ESPN and 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports already subscribe to the service.
For cable sports or cable news, Nielsen has seen lifts on a total day of 8 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively, according to Abcarian.
The OOH metrics are a separate number that do not contribute directly to C3 or C7 ratings. “But it is a Nielsen metric that then gets made available to the buying platforms as well to allow buyers and sellers to transact on those audiences,” Abcarian adds.
As Nielsen adds more networks on a national level to its OOH offering, it’s also making it available to local stations and cable networks.
“We really see this as a broad coverage play to ensure that these audiences are being counted across our national ratings and our local ratings alike.”
The 77,000-person panel, when projected out, represents about 65% of U.S. TV households, according to Abcarian.
