Aug 13 2021
Thought Leadership

It’s Time for a New Currency

A reaction to Nielsen’s hiatus on MRC accreditation

Recently, Nielsen announced a hiatus of its national TV Media Rating Council accreditation in order to address panel concerns alongside their migration to Nielsen One, their cross-panel measurement solution, after mounting pressure from The VAB and TV networks. While the ratings giant is often faulted with having a small panel size that is not representative of the US, under-representing minorities, using antiquated technology (just talk to the local TV folks), the news did not come as a surprise to many industry veterans.

Having been committed to data transparency and advanced measurement since 2014, VideoAmp partners with the buy-side to change measurement behaviors, and with media owners to establish an alternative trading currency. What’s more, VideoAmp continues to focus on licensing, cleansing, and joining (or what we call commingling – you can read more about that here) big data assets to provide a truly representative footprint of viewership across TV. Our process involves collecting complementary data sets from Smart TV ACR providers alongside Set-Top Box data to capture viewing that helps inform the planning, buying, and measurement process across the ecosystem. VideoAmp’s mission is to enable a sophisticated data-driven ecosystem that benefits buyers and sellers of media, and ultimately consumers. 

Big data assets are not plug-and-play – they require expertise in processing, normalizing, and modeling data in a way that makes the dataset usable by multiple parties and by our own platform. That’s why we’ve leaned in with some of the largest publishers and networks to support advanced audience planning and buying, as demonstrated by our work with OpenAP and with Snowflake and NBCU, among others. Today, we are collecting thousands of data points from digital and making the connection to TV, laying the groundwork for a true cross-platform solution.

And we are just getting started. We’re on the path to transform a 100-year old industry by powering a more effective three-way value exchange that results in advertisers increasing their return on investment, publishers increasing their revenues and improving the viewing experience for consumers. Yesterday’s announcement from Nielsen hopefully serves as a wake-up call that there must be alternatives and that the status quo should always be questioned; after all, the one thing in media that is constant is change.