ORLANDO – The rapid shift in people’s television viewing habits during the pandemic, when many people were stuck at home and signed up for streaming services, pushed audience measurement companies to adapt their tabulations. Nielsen, whose television ratings have helped to determine how massive sums of advertiser money is spent, developed its Nielsen One platform to help measure cross-media audiences.
“We actually cover 90% of the digital ad spend across our large network of partners, and it’s trusted,” Alison Gensheimer, senior vice president and head of global marketing at Nielsen, said in this interview at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference.
“When you’re an advertiser and you have to stand in front of your CFO or whoever and justify your budget…you want to know that what you’re actually building that on is trusted,” she said. “We have a trusted data set. We have a backbone of data science and that’s what we brought to bear in order to help with cross-media measurement.”
While Nielsen has a panel of households that document their viewing habits, it also has partnered with connected television publishers to evaluate the streaming audience. A key part of effective audience measurement is establishing how advertising affects outcomes such as final sales of products and services.
“They’re really starting to talk about planning and audiences and outcomes,” Gensheimer said. “We started with measurement and then we took that backbone, took that thinking and we started to build on it to enable planning.”
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