Maybe the Currency Wars aren’t quite over.
Or maybe the TV ad industry is poised to go it alone in the near future.
Last week, the National Football League publicly criticized Nielsen for its recent decision to make changes to how it tracks audiences, including the way it accounts for co-viewing and how data from various sources are weighted when calculating TV viewership.
This week, I sat down with the NFL’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer Paul Ballew to talk about these moves, and the overall state of TV measurement for the latest episode of Next in Media - and let’s just say that Ballew did not mince words. Not only did he express frustration with what he sees as a rushed and unnecessary product decision, but Ballew described an overall lack of confidence in Nielsen, while intimating a willingness to work with other partners, and even an inclination to rethink TV measurement overall in the near future.
Regarding the most recent Nielsen move, Ballew said “this rush… to implement a series of fixes where we don’t have sufficient impact data…They continue to have lack of clarity around some of the methodological changes that we’re trying to get our arms around.” The NFL said early testing indicates that this move will hurt live sports, which would surely raise alarm bells, given how much live sports carries the TV business overall.
But to hear Ballew put it, this latest tweak is part of a larger pattern of problems that is hurting the league’s confidence in Nielsen’s overall trajectory.
“This year has really raised issues in our minds about whether or not we can help Nielsen get to that next level,” he said. “We’ll see how it plays out, but somewhere along the line, something has to give. Very few organizations can have this amount of tension and at times outright hostility between themselves and their customers.”
Of course, whether Nielsen is moving too fast or too slow on methodology changes may depend on who you talk to. The Media Rating Council is said to be behind this new push as of October of last year, and the initial plan was to implement in first quarter of this year.
I asked Ballew how he’d assess Nielsen’s much-publicized overall push to master measuring connected TV viewership, and to embrace a big data-plus-panel strategy. He knocked Nielsen’s ability to bring together first-party data, set top data and other sources - and said that the company’s evolution was far from complete.
“Every time we want to help them graduate to the next grade, they then do something that forces us to hold them back another year.”
Ouch. This is no small thing, considering that, as has been well documented, the NFL accounts for the vast majority of top audience draws each year, and the league’s partners pony up tens of billions in rights fees in just a few years. This is not a small cable network grumbling about a few ratings points.
In fact, the NFL’s audience has been booming of late - and the league still isn’t happy with Nielsen.
For its part, Nielsen issued the following statement:
“Nielsen is delivering the most accurate TV measurement ever, especially when it comes to live sports. We have worked closely with clients, sports leagues and industry regulators to constantly enhance our methodologies. That includes the introduction of Big Data + Panel, the expansion of our Out of Home measurement and a pilot test of co-viewing updates, which are all successful examples of collaboration that lead into the enhancements.”
What does all this mean? How seriously should we take such sniping? After all, I have written a lot about how the Currency Wars ultimately seem to be about noise. Every time a big media company like NBC Universal or Paramount complains about Nielsen, or threatens to go all in with another player, they end up re-upping with Nielsen. Meanwhile, would-be competitors like Videoamp are shrinking, while iSpot focuses heavily on tracking outcomes
“The alternative currency [discussion] was really the publishers and the networks primarily trying to gain maybe some leverage,” said iSpot CEO Sean Muller in a podcast interview a few months ago.
So I asked Ballew whether this latest dustup was simply an example of media companies slamming Nielsen as a public negotiating tactic. After all, just six months ago, Ballew told Front Office Sports that Nielsen had made strides on co-viewing tech. “I have to give Nielsen credit,” he said. “We’ve pushed them really hard…they’ve listened and come up with ideas to address the issue.”
But at this moment, “The frustration’s real,” Ballew told me. And in his view, it’s not just the NFL that is frustrated.
“The ongoing restatements, the ongoing changes, the ongoing errors and omissions,” he said, they all add up in the industry’s mind.
“If you’re the currency, you can’t be in a perpetual cycle of, ‘whoops, I’m wrong. I gotta restate.’”
What really struck me was how Ballew described Nielsen’s culture - almost questioning whether it is fully capable of making the necessary changes.
I then asked him about Nielsen’s recent decision to spend $2 billion on DoubleVerify, and he was largely unmoved. “I think if you’re Nielsen, you’re trying to figure out how different piece parts in this overall ad verification optimization ecosystem play. And does it have some synergies potentially? I’m not exactly sure how they’re putting all those piece parts together. I think that it’s an interesting company, but then you’re leaving it as a standalone entity as well. So I’m really unclear at this point in time.”
You might ask, what does it say when the most important TV partner doesn’t seem to grasp why a company buys an ad tech verification firm, and the subtext seems to be - why are you spending money on stuff like that when you haven’t made the core investments you need to fix your main business?
Here’s where things got really interesting. I expected that Ballew might hint that the NFL and its partners could switch research partners. That door seems open, but he also indicated that there may come a day when TV titans might want to follow the lead of Meta and Google, and simply play by their own rules.
“I think if there’s a possibility that you will see switching in some parts of the currency, and you can end up with two currencies,” Ballew said. But, down the road,
“Could you envision a a universe five years from now, ten years from now, where a currency to transact on is number of subs that are watching, number of device IDs, etc. “Why not? Especially as the media landscape gets more and more fragmented and we’re consuming content vis devices versus traditional channels?”
I'm confident in saying that's the only "Revenge of the Nerds" video clip ever shown in an article about the NFL.