Nielsen’s ‘Big Data + Panel’ Gets MRC Accreditation

Tim Cross-Kovoor 23 January, 2025 

US TV measurement mainstay Nielsen has announced that its ‘Big Data + Panel’ national TV measurement has received accreditation from influential industry body the Media Ratings Council (MRC).

Big Data + Panel is a major part of Nielsen’s efforts to modernise its TV ratings tools, to keep up with fragmenting viewership. It combines Nielsen’s existing panel-based measurement with data provided from set-top boxes, smart TVs, and streaming services. Nielsen says that together, these data sets give a granular and accurate view of TV viewership, solving some of the issues inherent with solely panel-based measurement.

“The accreditation of Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel is a landmark moment for TV ratings, as it will forever change audience measurement,” said Karthik Rao, Nielsen CEO. “No one else pairs a high quality, representative panel with a data set this large, pulling from smart TVs and set top boxes in more than 45 million homes. I believe Big Data + Panel gives the industry the most accurate measurement in the history of TV. We’re grateful to our clients for helping us innovate once again.”

Hybrid future

Less than four years ago, Nielsen took a major knock when its national and local TV ratings lost accreditation from the Media Ratings Council. While the MRC’s decision related to undercounting of viewing during the pandemic specifically, it also reflected wider frustration from parts of the industry with Nielsen’s measurement tools, which some felt hadn’t kept up with changes in TV consumption.

So even when Nielsen’s traditional national panel regained accreditation in 2023, the company’s focus was on driving adoption of its more advanced measurement tools — tools which will likely render the traditional panel as a standalone product fairly redundant.

Not to say that the panel itself is going anywhere. Nielsen, as is the case for most European measurement joint industry committees (JICs), believes that panels have a big role to play in TV measurement. They can be created and adjusted to give a representative view of the population, they’re independent, and they safeguard against fraud and artificial viewership inflation.

But Nielsen, like many of the JICs, believe the future of TV measurement involves combining traditional panels with big data sets – whether that’s impression-level data from the broadcasters themselves, return-path data from set-top boxes, or automatic content recognition (ACR) data from tech vendors.

The large data sets help with granularity, avoiding issues like ‘zero ratings’, where no panellists tune into a particular TV channel. The panel meanwhile helps authenticate and interpret these big data sets. Nielsen says it can recognise when data from a partnered device or streaming service relates to one of its panellists, allowing it to verify the accuracy and calibrate those big data sets.

The UK’s measurement body BARB is going down a similar route, having issued a tender for combining its own panel with big data sets. And indeed, several of Nielsen’s US competitors use a mix of panel data and ACR and/or set-top box data. Even if they’re not particularly vocal about the panel part, many vendors use panels to verify and calibrate the other data sets they’re working with.

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2025-01-23T13:38:26+01:00

About the Author:

Tim Cross is Assistant Editor at VideoWeek.
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