Nielsen, an information and measurement firm, have announced they’re launching ‘Nielsen Online Audience Segments – TV Viewing’, to help marketers connect with TV audiences when they’re online. Nielsen say their audience segments will enable marketers to improve campaign performance by strategically aligning their TV and online ad campaigns.
However, Nielsen will be building out their data sets using panels that contain a representative sample of both TV and online panelists to create segments based on viewers, rather than households. So Nielsen’s segments will be be based on types of TV viewership, including ‘shows or channels most viewed, heavy or light viewers, genres and viewer attributes’.
Nielsen’s audience segments are clearly aimed at enticing TV buyers online and their arrival is just one of a number of industry moves that aim to harmonise the TV and online video/IPTV advertising markets. This year we’ve already had the digital GRPs and the digital upfronts – now we have TV-like data segments to help make TV brand advertisers feel at home.
However, on the face of it, Nielsen’s data doesn’t sound like it’s going to have the same level of granularity as, say, quality third party cookie data that is guaranteed to have come from a specific source, such as a price comparison site or a certain type of publisher. But then this is very much uppper funnel data in any case, and categorising users in relatively broad TV-like terms may actually act as an advantage when it comes to delivering brand campaigns at scale online, but with same level of targeting that brand advertisers are already familiar with offline.
Nielsen say their segments will enable marketers to reach consumers online based on things like lifestyle, demographics and consumer packaged goods (CPG) habits. The segments can be accessed in multiple ways – including an application programming interface (API), a direct match system, or by server-to-server matching with Nielsen’s data management platform (DMP), powered by eXelate – based on how Nielsen collaborators choose to manage the buying or selling of inventory. Thus far Nielsen are partnering with Microsoft, Adap.TV, Specific Media, Undertone, and Videology.
