Nielsen Crosses Channels With Online Cable TV

Nielsen (no longer just the TV folks) has announced Nielsen Online Audience Segments – online cable TV Viewing. The offering provides marketers with the ability to connect with TV audiences online and more strategically align TV and to watch TV live. Nielsen has also announced a multi-year collaboration with DG, a global ad management and distribution platform, for joint development of cross-platform offerings. TV Viewing Crosses Online/Offline Bridge

Nielsen has signed a slew of early adopters including Microsoft, Adap.TV, Specific Media, Undertone, and Videology, for its Audience online cable TV Viewing. One key difference between these metrics and Nielsen's historic TV metrics is that it targets viewing behavior from individuals, rather than in households, for a granular picture. Advertisers can theoretically follow a TV viewer to exactly where they go online.

Nielsen describes the opportunity to marketers as this: Nielsen Online Audience Segments – online cable TV Viewing leverages Nielsen’s unique data assets and TV knowledge and correlates how people watch TV live with how they behave online. Nielsen uses a unique, representative sample of both TV and online panelists, providing a privacy-protected source for segment models based on viewers, rather than on households. By building segments based on types of TV viewership, including shows or channels most viewed, heavy or light viewers, genres and viewer attributes, Nielsen is able to model a group of consumers ideal for a specific campaign or message.

As part of its Nielsen Online Audience Segments solution, Nielsen also offers the ability to reach consumers online based on lifestyle, demographics and consumer packaged goods (CPG) habits.

"This is a tremendous next step in connecting the dots between offline and online behavior. The fact that we’re using the very same data that’s deployed within the traditional TV economy is a key differentiator which resonates with the industry," said Jonathan Carson, General Manager of Digital for Nielsen.

Nielsen Online Audience 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.

The introduction of Nielsen Online Audience Segments – Watch TV live joins other recent Nielsen advancements in the online advertising ecosystem, including the launch of the Nielsen Innovation Lab, designed to identify and develop ideas that elevate understanding of ad effectiveness across platforms, and recent enhancements to the Nielsen Campaign Ratings suite which adds capabilities for viewability, verification and breakthrough for online ads.