Nielsen to Roll Out Individual Ad Ratings

Nielsen is changing the way it measures TV ads.

The ratings service — which has been under pressure from advertisers and broadcasters to upgrade its offerings — is set to roll out a new commercial ratings system that will allow for measuring viewership of individual ads, rather than the average audience for all commercial minutes in a given program. The individual commercial ratings will become available in the first half of 2022.

The change is intended provide ad buyers with more granular ratings as the industry moves to more targeted, addressable ads. Nielsen is working with creative logistics company Extreme Reach to encode a large majority of national linear TV ads with Nielsen’s watermarks and allow for measurement for duration of less than a minute. The individual ad metrics are an upgrade over the current “C3” ratings currency, which measure the average audience for commercials in a program within three days of the initial airing.

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“Giving the industry true, trusted metrics that offer harmonization across platforms is the bedrock to revolutionizing the cross-media buying and selling process and a foundational step toward Nielsen ONE,” said Nielsen senior vp product management Kim Gilberti, referring to the company’s long in the works cross-platform metric. “By transforming our TV measurement and moving to individual commercial metrics, both media buyers and sellers will be able to maximize the value of their inventory as well as capitalize and drive return on investment of their advertising spend across the rapidly converging traditional and digital landscapes.”

Ad buyers and networks have sharply criticized Nielsen in the past year for issues with the company’s national TV ratings panel during the pandemic. Oversight board the Media Rating Council suspended Nielsen’s accreditation for national TV ratings in September (though it’s still the common currency of the business), and NBCUniversal, among others, are searching for new ways of measuring audiences.