Nielsen is one of the rea­sons bil­lions of dol­lars are spent on adver­tis­ing every year.  Nielsen is the way adver­tis­er’s deter­mine on which media to spend their mon­ey.  The media mar­ket has changed since Nielsen was found­ed in 1923 by Arthur C. Nielsen, Sr., who invent­ed an approach to mea­sur­ing com­pet­i­tive sales results that made the con­cept of “mar­ket share” a prac­ti­cal man­age­ment tool.

Today’s world of adver­tis­ing is at his­toric spend lev­els, but they’re also fac­ing one of the most dif­fi­cult sea changes ever. In order to more accu­rate­ly make deci­sions they need to know what they’ve his­tor­i­cal­ly been able to know — who’s watch­ing what, when, and the rela­tion to pur­chas­es of the prod­ucts adver­tised dur­ing said watch­ing. But with the way peo­ple view con­tent, and con­se­quent­ly adver­tis­ing, chang­ing so dras­ti­cal­ly with mul­ti­ple screens and time-shift­ing options, that infor­ma­tion is get­ting hard­er to pin down.

Nielsen deals with Fragmentation and Reliability

The answer for many com­pa­nies such as NBCU­ni­ver­sal is to devel­op pro­pri­etary in-house solu­tions, but that’s a very incom­plete answer. If every com­pa­ny is using pro­pri­etary mea­sur­ing meth­ods, it’s impos­si­ble to com­pare apples to apples. That makes ad buy­ers ner­vous, and right­ly so. Spend­ing bil­lions of dol­lars on deci­sions made using the equiv­a­lent of a blind­fold­ed pin-the-tail-on-the-don­key ses­sion is dan­ger­ous stuff, finan­cial­ly speaking.

But the sit­u­a­tion isn’t quite as dire as some would make it out to be because there is still a strong­hold of reli­a­bil­i­ty out there, even if they’re fac­ing the same chal­lenges. Nielsen is the found­ing father of media rat­ings, and they’ve been excelling at their job for almost a cen­tu­ry now. It’s true that they’re going to have to adapt in order to retain their king of the hill sta­tus, but they’re in the best posi­tion to do so and they’re already turn­ing the ship in the right direction.

Eyes Everywhere

It may seem that Nielsen’s day has come and gone, a rel­ic of a past age. But with 93 years of expe­ri­ence at what they do com­bined with the changes they’re cur­rent­ly work­ing on, it’s s safe bet that the new­com­ers to the game will have a tough time keep­ing up with them. In just the past few months Nielsen has announced sev­er­al new ini­tia­tives, includ­ing nation­al out of home report­ing ser­vice that will track view­ers in air­ports, bars, and oth­er away-from-the-liv­ing-room view­ers, with ESPN being the first (and most log­i­cal) client. They’ve received MRC accred­i­ta­tion for view­able GRP demos in dig­i­tal ad rat­ings, allow­ing them to track view­ers on PCs an mobile devices, and made changes to their Total Audi­ence Mea­sure­ment prod­uct par­tial­ly in response to con­cerns from media companies.

Also notable is Nielsen’s dive into arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, enabling mar­keters to instant­ly act on changes in audi­ence behav­ior that improve mar­ket­ing rel­e­vance and results through the Nielsen Mar­ket­ing Cloud. This will give mar­keters the abil­i­ty to opti­mize their audi­ences based on real-time streams com­ing from a clien­t’s cus­tomer data, such as online pur­chas­es or vis­its to a web­site page or app. In short, they aren’t ready to give up the game to the com­pe­ti­tion yet.

Our take here at Media Jobs is that Nielsen is in a strong posi­tion to remain the leader in their field and push new bound­aries, and might offer a great mix of a sol­id and well estab­lished com­pa­ny that is tak­ing on the chal­lenges of the future as well or bet­ter than the up and com­ers. Unless peo­ple stop watch­ing tele­vi­sion con­tent or adver­tis­ers walk away from it — both of which are as unlike­ly today as peo­ple sprout­ing wings and fly­ing to Mars.