Nielsen said that it is not ready to participate in the recently formed Joint Industry Committee’s process for certifying companies that provide audience measurement.
“There are fundamental legal, operational and scientific issues that will need to be resolved before Nielsen will agree to participate,” Karthik Rao, CEO of global audience measurement at Nielsen, said in a letter to David Levy, CEO of OpenAP, which is organizing the JIC on behalf of most of the major traditional television programmers.
The JIC had sent measurement companies a request for information that was due to be returned on Friday. The JIC is holding a pre-upfront meeting this week in which many media companies, media buying agencies and measurement companies will be participating.
“Responding to the RFI now will give a false impression that we endorse the JIC’s requirements. We do not,” Rao said. “This well-meaning process has been rushed, and we respectfully suggest that more time be spent addressing the above issues before a formal RFI is issued.”
The JIC said it would have a formal response to Nielsen on Monday. In a statement, it said that “the JIC believes that all solutions must be subject to the same level of scrutiny so that buyers and sellers have confidence transacting. No one measurement company should be able to influence the requirements to benefit their bid for certification over their competition.”
Plans to form the JIC were announced in January by media companies including Comcast-NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and TelevisaUnivision, with the VAB representing smaller programmers. Other companies have subsequently signed on.
The JIC’s goal is to create standards for what seems to be becoming a multi-currency world for buyers and sellers of video advertising. With streaming changing how audiences view content and commercials, the industry’s desire for alternatives to Nielsen, which has long dominated the audience measurement business, has intensified.
The largest media buying agencies participated as part of “working groups” that created the JIC’s initial set of goals and principles.
In his letter Rao thanked the JIC for having an open dialog and said the JIC could be helpful in building trust and transparency with the media market.
But Nielsen has issues with the JIC’s stance that big data from set-top boxes and smart TV sets should be assumed to be better than panel data. (Nielsen is in the process of rolling out Nielsen One, a new measurement system that incorporates big data in its estimates.
Nielsen questioned the JIC’s standard for certification and what role certification plays in comparison to the Media Rating Council’s accreditation of measurement services. (The MRC last week restored the accreditation of Nielsen’s legacy panel-based national TV measurement service.)
Nielsen also raised concerns about protecting its intellectual property and potential antitrust issues and noted that Disney. Amazon, YouTube and other streaming platforms were absent from the JIC.
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“Only a subset of industry participants created the JIC standards, and significant media companies either were not invited to participate or have chosen not to participate,” Rao said. “ And we don’t see how a company owned by a consortium of industry players [OpenAP], vs the independent, nonprofit status of most JICs around the world can manage this.”
Rao didn’t close the door on Nielsen working with the JIC in the future.
“Once you can address the essential issues we’ve raised with the JIC, we would be delighted to engage in thoughtful dialogue and reconsider our position,” Rao said. “We hope the offer still stands to participate in your meeting next week as we remain interested in learning and better understanding what this new committee is thinking about.”
The JIC said that some of Rao’s concerns represented “inaccuracies and misinterpretations” of what the JIC was doing.
“The JIC is moving with velocity to bring transparency to the currency readiness of new cross-platform measurement solutions and to define common standards so that we can ultimately have more competition across multiple currencies. The baseline requirements are aggregated feedback developed in a cross-industry collaborative forum with media agencies, publishers, streaming platforms and trade bodies having equal voice on what is needed to safely and responsibly transition a multibillion-dollar marketplace,” the JIC said.
“Collaboration is the only way to move this industry forward. We believe that there is an important role for Nielsen and we encourage them to join JIC members and all other measurement companies under the tent to listen to feedback and respond on how they are going to address their customers’ concerns,” the JIC said.
