Dive Brief:

• Nielsen is going outside the box – the TV box – with its new total audience measurement tool that will track audiences across all platforms.
• According to Nielsen EVP Megan Clarken this project is the most comprehensive ever undertaken by Nielsen.
• The new tool, expected to roll out in December, will provide both marketers and TV executives a measurement tool everyone has wanted, especially given the falling TV viewership numbers.

Dive Insight:

One ongoing complaint about Nielsen’s audience measurement tools from marketers and TV executives is they only tracked TV and lost that audience as soon as they left for other platforms. After a year-long effort, Nielsen is set to launch a response to those issues with its new total audience measurement that will track an audience across all platforms.

Clarken explained to Adweek the scope and challenge of creating the new measurement tool, "What we have to do to perform a cross-platform total audience measurement is line all of those numbers up, so they have to be apples-to-apples comparisons. They have to follow the same underlying rules. They have to be on a single-sourced platform, because otherwise you're cobbling numbers together and creating Frankenmetrics."

Given TV’s falling viewership, total audience measurement will allow marketers and TV industry players to fully measure and monetize TV viewers by allowing them to measure that audience across multiple platforms.

Nielsen is also rolling out ad viewability measurements, including video, by demographics by the end of the year. The viewability measurements are an expansion of an existing partnership with Integral Ad Sciences.