Nielsen Moves to 'Subminute' Tracking of Linear TV

Nielsen has enhanced its Individual Commercial Metrics service with the addition of television viewing audience estimates based on individual ads rather than commercial minutes. The change is intended to aid comparison of digital and linear TV commercials.

While the industry currently transacts on Nielsen's 'C3' metric (ads watched live or within three days via DVR playback), based on the average of all commercial minutes in a program, the new Individual Commercial Metrics capability measures linear television at a 'subminute' level and audience estimates at a level of granularity more comparable to digital. The ratings firm says this paves the way for its single, cross-media solution Nielsen ONE to provide 'true deduplication across platforms'.

As part of the enhancement, through an expanded relationship with cross-media video advertising solutions provider Extreme Reach, Nielsen says it has been able to encode the 'vast majority' of national linear TV commercials with its own watermarks. Early next year, it will enhance its process for collecting and crediting watermarks to detect for them a number of times within each minute. Nielsen's TV measurement will also use Gracenote Content Signatures, which will allow for crediting in instances where there is no watermark present.

Kim Gilberti (pictured), Nielsen SVP Product Management comments: 'By transforming our TV measurement and moving to Individual Commercial Metrics, both media buyers and sellers will be able to maximize the value of their inventory as well as capitalize and drive return on investment of their advertising spend across the rapidly converging traditional and digital landscapes'.

Web sites: www.nielsen.com and www.extremereach.com .