Some of the nation’s biggest advertisers, media agencies, and broadcast and cable TV networks are joining to compete against the Nielsen ratings service, Financial Times reports. Nielsen Media Research controls the measurement of U.S. TV audiences through the polling of some 18,000 homes and, based on those measurements, influences billions of dollars of advertising revenue.
The group includes networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Disney, advertisers Procter & Gamble, AT&T and Unilever, and media agencies such as Group M and the Starcom MediaVest Group.
“The involvement of such big names highlights how urgently advertisers feel the need for better information to justify their returns on investments from ads that run across multiple media platforms,” Financial Times says.
The consortium appears to be focused on getting single-source data that measures cross-platform TV and digital viewing, says TV Week. It is expected to be up and running next month and commissioning data by the fourth quarter.
Would-be competitors to Nielsen in the 1980s and 1990s ultimately failed because they didn’t get enough financial support from the media community, TV Week says.
Tags: Neilsen, ratings, Television