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Nielsen CEO Addresses Multimedia Measurement
In a keynote speech to the Detroit Economic Club this week, Susan Whiting, President and CEO of Nielsen Media Research, spoke about the company's attempts to provide new measurement services that can accurately capture increasingly fragmented multimedia audiences.
According to Nielsen's research, TV viewing last season was 2.7% higher than the season before, and 12.5% higher than ten years ago. However, Whiting pointed out, TV broadcasters are now in competition with Internet companies, telephone services, and mobile device manufacturers, and research shows four out of five television viewers are doing something else as they watch TV. According to Whiting, 'Americans today are awash in media'.
'Certainly, audiences will go on splintering,' she predicted. 'Power will increasingly shift to the viewers, businesses will collide and converge in attempts to create new means to reach the 'anything, anywhere, anytime' consumer. Yet some things won't change. Advertisers will still need media. Media will need advertisers. And both will continue to need audience research of the highest quality. In an increasingly fragmented national marketplace, intimately knowing every segment of the audience depends on how well measurement services like Nielsen Media Research can accurately gauge audience behaviour.'
Whiting listed some of Nielsen's measurement innovations, including the Portable People Meter (PPM) system and the measurement of viewing using DVR systems such as TiVo. She added: 'We're looking at and testing everything - meters attached to TV sets and those that can be carried in your pocket, devices that can be mailed or sent via the Internet, and systems that must be installed by a technician, measurement services that collect and report enormous amounts of concise data.'
Concluding, Whiting stated: 'We recognise that competing technologies, diverse audiences and continually evolving viewing environments will require different measurement solutions. A one-size-fits-all approach is no approach at all.'
The full transcript of the presentation is online at www.everyonecounts.tv/0130_whiting_dec.html
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