Dive Summary:

• Nielsen announced that it is launching Cross-Platform Online Campaign Ratings, a combined approach to calculating the sizes of online and TV audiences, as well as where those audiences overlap.
• The service could be useful to clients such as the CW, who cater to both types of viewers.
• Michael Hayes, president of digital communications at Initiative Worldwide worries that Nielsen's move oversimplifies the two kinds of viewers because TVs and digital devices involve different user habits.

From the article:

Is an online viewer just as valuable to advertisers as a TV viewer? Up until now, the answer was no. Nielsen is looking to change that with the introduction today of its Cross-Platform Online Campaign Ratings, which will measure the number of people who watched a campaign only on TV, the number who viewed it digitally and the overlap between the two.

"This is the first time we can show the number of people who saw a campaign no matter where it lived," said Steve Hasker, Nielsen's president of global media products and advertiser solutions. ...