Nielsen Expands Relationship With 'Extreme Reach'

Nielsen announced that it will enhance its National television measurement by measuring viewing in a more precise manner, allowing for a future where audience estimates are based on individual ads rather than commercial minutes. The enhancement to Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics will help pave the way for true comparability across the digital and linear platforms and comes following a series of tech, measurement and methodology advancements as Nielsen continues to make progress in its delivery of Nielsen ONE, its cross-platform measurement solution.

With more precise commercial measurement, agencies, advertisers and brands will have the unprecedented ability to directly compare, plan and optimize ad campaign performance over both digital platforms and linear TV. 

Nielsen has expanded its relationship with Extreme Reach, the global leader in creative logistics, allowing for an efficient way of encoding the vast majority of all national linear TV commercials with Nielsen's watermarks, which will launch in the first half of 2022. Extreme Reach's end-to-end technology platform moves creative at the speed of media, simplifying the activation and optimization of omnichannel campaigns for brands and agencies with unparalleled control, visibility and insights.

"We're very pleased to collaborate with Nielsen on this important step in improving workflow efficiency for marketing teams, which has been at the core of our mission at Extreme Reach for over a decade. As the source of creative assets for the majority of brands, including over 90 of the Ad Age 100, ER is uniquely positioned to enable measurement of those assets at greater scale. Nielsen's ongoing efforts to embrace the morphing worlds of linear and digital TV now provide a means for marketers and their agencies to understand and value digital and linear TV commercials in a directly comparable way, which is a distinct improvement for the industry," said Gaurav Agarwal, Chief Operating Officer at Extreme Reach.

While the industry currently transacts on Nielsen's "C3" metric, based on the average of all commercial minutes in a program, Nielsen's new Individual Commercial Metrics reporting capability will enable the measurement of linear television at a "subminute" level and audience estimates at a level of granularity that is more comparable to digital. Providing comparability in this manner paves the way for Nielsen ONE to provide something long sought after as an industry imperative—true deduplication across platforms.

"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 Kim Gilberti, SVP Product Management, Nielsen. "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."