Nielsen Confirms It Will No Longer Sunset Legacy TV Ratings

It would be an understatement to say that the measurement industry has undergone a lot of changes in the last few years, especially for Nielsen.

In April 2023, the analytics giant regained national accreditation from the Media Rating Council after getting it suspended in 2021. Then, the company added a new leader in late 2023 with the appointment of Karthik Rao as CEO. And ahead of the latest upfront, Nielsen announced that its combination of panel data and big data measurement was available to use as its official currency.

Beyond that, Paramount and Nielsen are in an ongoing dispute following the company’s contract expiring. Though an agreement may still be reached, Paramount continues to work with other measurement companies, including VideoAmp. Complicating the matter more, Nielsen sued VideoAmp earlier this year, stating that it was using patented technology to contribute to its measurement data, which has “irreparably harmed Nielsen.“

It’s been a roller coaster, perhaps exemplified best by Nielsen’s stance on its legacy C3 and C7 metrics (viewership within three or seven days), the industry’s standard currency for advertiser transactions. The company previously noted it would be sunsetting C3 and C7. Then, it delayed that announcement, and now, Deirdre Thomas, Nielsen’s chief product officer, tells ADWEEK that’s not going to happen at all. C3 and C7 are here to stay.

Thomas spoke with ADWEEK about Nielsen’s stance on its metrics, why she’s optimistic about the competition in the industry, and what new innovations to expect from Nielsen in the new year.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Earlier this year, Nielsen announced it would make its panel+ big data measurement available as currency. Have any challenges come from that?

Nielsen’s strategy for measuring audiences today is to use a combination of a big data or a census data with a representative person’s level panel because we believe you need both of those critical ingredients, and they play different roles in the measurement. So what the census data—or the big data—does is it provides you with the scale and the coverage to actually capture everything, given how fragmented people are today and what they consume.

Then you need a panel because census data and big data is messy and noisy and has a lot of issues and gaps in it. It’s also machine data. It’s telling you that this machine had something going on, not who was using that machine or watching that screen, and that’s really what marketers care about. The third reason is to be representative because big data sets have their biases and may not represent people of all demographics, race, ethnicity, or income.

So, how has the rollout gone?

We have been working on bringing big data into our national and our local TV measurement for some time. On the national front, we’ve been working on this for a couple of years now in partnership with our clients. We started putting out impact data over two years ago, and at that time, it consisted of four providers: Dish, DirecTV, Vizio, and Roku. This year, we continue to produce data, but also include Comcast. So we now have five data providers over 100 million devices—huge scale coverage. We believe this is the best way to measure, and that’s why we’re pushing this direction.

We’ve made the big data+ panel data stream available for transactions since last year because many clients were ready to move forward and use that—because it did a better job for finding their audiences—and we continue to do so.

How does this affect the upcoming TV upfront?

As we head into the 2025-26 upfront, it is a really exciting time because clients have now had the data for multiple years in their hands. They’ve got a chance to get familiar with it. It is still different—and change is very hard—but there’s been some time, and we’ve spent a lot of time trying to work with clients to help them prepare for this change.

Bringing big data into our traditional television measurement is a really important step for being able to do advanced audience measurement across traditional television as well as streaming and other forms of digital, and that’s what we have available today in our Nielsen One Ads measurement.

That’s all about national, and just to touch on the local front as well, we’re very excited that we’re bringing Comcast into our measurement and making that available for action beginning in January 2025, and that’s an important step for all the same reasons as with national. It provides greater stability. It provides coverage of the long tail and better measurement across the local markets.

When ADWEEK previously spoke with Nielsen this spring, CEO Karthik Rao mentioned that Nielsen was sunsetting C3 and C7. Are there any updates on that front?

C3 and C7 are here and not going anywhere. The reason for that is we’ve heard loud and clear from our clients—not from the industry—that it’s an important metric for them. It’s something that they need and are used to using as they run their business. So while we had initially, back in 2020, said that we intended to retire C3 and C7 because we thought an individual commercial rating was more directly comparable to digital measurement, and thus, the best way to think about it when you look at stuff across media or cross-platform. What we’ve heard is that, sure, there are ways to make television more granular, more comparable to digital, but you don’t have to do that and take away C3. There’s no reason for that.

Instead, we have launched, as we said we would, on time. We launched individual commercial metrics, which is an exact rating for every ad in a linear television program, and we need to produce C3 because they’re both valuable.

Nielsen is partnering with Netflix to measure the NFL Christmas Day games. Can you share the plans around that?

We’re proud and excited to be the measurement partner for Netflix for their NFL Christmas games—as we are for Amazon Thursday Night Football—and we’re proud that we’re accredited for this kind of measurement, for bringing first-party publisher data into our service in concert with our panel to measure live streaming. This goes back to what I said before about our measurement approach is to use a big data set in combination with panel, and we were proud to receive MRC accreditation for our first-party live-streaming methodology last month. It’s the first accredited streaming measurement product in the market.

There’s a lot of competition in the space now between Netflix announcing that they’re working with VideoAmp in the new year and there’s the ongoing dispute with Paramount. Are you able to share anything about that and what the competitive landscape could look like in the next year? 

In terms of the competitive landscape, Nielsen has always had competition, and that is a good thing because it drives us to be better. But it forces us to continually improve and provide better and better service, so we welcome that, and we’re proud of the quality and the innovation we put out in the market to keep pace with consumers.

Are there any other announcements to expect from Nielsen in the next year? 

We haven’t talked about it explicitly, so I’ll talk about the fact that our streaming measurement coverage is really unsurpassed. If you look across the publishers that we measure CTV ads for, we measure Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Roku, Tubi, and YouTube—you name it. We don’t have everybody, but we have really robust coverage of the CTV ad space. That was important given how much viewing is happening on streaming and given how many ad dollars are moving there. We’re proud of that coverage, and that’s an important ingredient, as I mentioned before, to our Nielsen One Ads product. So that’s an important thing. We always are continuing to expand that.