In a blow to longtime industry standard-bearer Nielsen Holdings PLC, NBCUniversal Media LLC will be using certified measurement from iSpot.tv Inc. to help guide its national upfront negotiations for the 2022-23 TV season.
Comcast Corp.'s programming arm is also turning to Comscore Inc. to provide an alternative to Nielsen on the local TV market front.
During the upfront, content providers look to sell linear and digital schedules to media agencies and their clients ahead of the upcoming TV season.
Speaking at the One22 ad tech event on March 22 at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York, Kelly Abcarian, NBCU's executive vice president of measurement and impact for advertising and partnerships, said the company will be ready to transact based on iSpot.tv data following its upfront presentation to advertisers at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall on May 16.
Abcarian told S&P Global Market Intelligence that iSpot.tv's capabilities represent "a seismic shift in measuring ads as opposed to transacting on programming-based proxies for audiences."
Abcarian said iSpot.tv can supply marketers with what they want: a way to measure their ads and performance across all screens.
With increased viewing on streaming platforms, including NBCU's aggregate service Peacock and other ad-supported video-on-demand services, Abcarian said the industry cannot wait for full implementation of Nielsen's Nielsen One cross-measurement platform that could arrive in 2024. "We're moving forward as opposed to waiting," she said.
NBCU is not closing the door to Nielsen measurement entirely, however.
"We always want to give flexibility to our advertisers in the way they transact and negotiate," Abcarian said. "But we believe there is real promise here in which to bring forward a new measurement and transactional model."
NBCU worked with iSpot's viewership data, which provides information about individual ads, during its presentation of the Beijing Winter Olympics and Super Bowl LVI.
Anthony Skinner, chief of engineering and product at iSpot, told attendees at the March 22 event that iSpot is working with 66 brands across the major holding companies on a pilot program now through the upfront presentation. The effort involves ad frequency and impressions, gauged on a second-by-second basis, across all screens.
NBCU has been active in seeking alternative ad solutions, sending out requests last year for proposals around measurement, verification, attribution, business plans and ad experiences. More than 120 companies responded.
The move came as Nielsen came under fire after the Video Advertising Bureau, or VAB, pointed out that the company's sample panels had eroded significantly during the pandemic, leading to viewership declines. Owing to safety concerns for its employees during the pandemic, Nielsen limited the number of field visits during the initial outbreak of COVID-19.
Nielsen sought a hiatus of its accreditation from the Media Rating Council to continue work on its Nielsen One multiplatform measurement offering. The industry watchdog organization instead suspended accreditation of Nielsen's national, local people meter and set meter market services. Nielsen has said it is committed to the audit process and resolving the suspension.
Nielsen is pushing toward a new measure in 2022 to gauge national viewing for individual commercials. The industry has been transacting since 2007 on the C3 ratings metric, which gauges the average of all commercial minutes in a program over a three-day period. Nielsen says its forthcoming "Individual Commercial Metrics" will provide a measurement of linear television at a "sub-minute" level. That will allow messages to be tracked in a manner akin to the digital world.
More recently, Nielsen rejected a takeover offer from Elliott Management Corp.