Industry Group Wants Nielsen Decertified

On Wednesday morning, the Video Advertising Bureau, which counts A+E Networks, Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS (among others) as members, delivered a letter to the MRC demanding that it suspend its accreditation of Nielsen’s national ratings service due to the measurement firm’s handling of its in-home panel, reports AdWeek.  That panel, which serves as the backbone of Nielsen’s television measurement products, has been cast into doubt since at least March 2020.

In the letter, Sean Cunningham, the VAB’s president and CEO, asked that the MRC suspend Nielsen accreditation “as quickly as possible.” The MRC, which serves as a third-party watchdog that reviews and accredits various forms of media audience measurement, sets minimum standards that companies must meet to be accredited media research ratings services. Nielsen, Cunningham charged, had repeatedly violated those standards.

The letter was accompanied by a 10-page document detailing the supposed shortcomings that the VAB and Nielsen have been butting heads over for months after the VAB accused Nielsen of “systemically under-counting” television viewership from March 2020 through March 2021. In May, Nielsen admitted that it had lowballed television viewership due to complications in maintaining its panel over the course of the pandemic after the MRC confirmed the same findings.

“There is a narrative in the marketplace that all is well,” Cunningham told Adweek Wednesday morning. “All is not well.”

At the center of the issue is Nielsen’s in-home panel, which is made up of households around the country who agree to have their household viewing habits monitored. During the pandemic, the company had to press pause on in-home maintenance visits, which check to make sure monitoring equipment is working properly and that people are actually occupying their homes, due to Covid-19 restrictions; those limitations, the VAB has previously charged, led to an undercount and an underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic households in particular.

Nielsen has taken steps this year to shore up its in-home panel and improve its relationship with its networks’ clients since the controversy spilled into public view in April, when the VAB pressured Nielsen to adjust its audience measurement figures through March 2020.