Nielsen Moves Into Ad Outcomes Business, Starting With Attention

Reach and frequency are no longer enough in the TV data business, even for Nielsen, the long-time leader in estimating how many viewers watched a particular program.

With giant digital platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook providing information about which ad drew clicks, generated requests for more information and led to online sales, advertisers are demanding similar metrics to justify their TV advertising investments.

Companies have measured KPIs such ad recall, message retention and increases in brand affinity, but marketers are looking for something more concrete so they can calculate return on advertising spending (ROAS).

A variety of metrics have sprung up to quantify the impact ads have and how much of an ultimate sale to attribute to various parts of a marketing campaign. Some traditional media companies have even offered to guarantee outcomes for their advertising clients.

Now NIelsen is announcing that it is adding an outcomes marketplace to Nielsen One, its ad campaign measurement platform. 

Nielsen One originally offered cross-platform measurement of reach and frequency. A new Outcomes Marketplace will bring in metrics for sales, attention and conversions.

The first offering in the Outcomes Marketplace is attention and emotional response as measured by research company Realeyes. Realeyes’s ad scoring also predicts brand sales outcomes, as well as media cost efficiency on social and video platforms, the companies said.

“All ad impressions are not equal, and knowing your creative strength is key to knowing and managing your total campaign potential and performance,” said Mihkel Jäätma, CEO of Realeyes. “Working with Nielsen and their new Outcomes Marketplace will allow even more accessibility for brands to better understand consumer response to advertising, and gain a better view into how ad creative contributes to sales outcomes and CPM.”

Realeyes says its technology applies facial coding to predictive, big-data analytics, driving business outcomes. Realeyes’ performance scores and recommendations are built on a growing truth set of more than 18 million human observations, mapping attention and emotion to more than 350 billion frames of video, across 90 countries. 

Influencer marketing platform Captiv8 is one of the first users of the attention capabilities on Nielsen One.

"Nielsen’s attention metrics raise the bar for influencer marketing. We’ve always pushed for deeper, more meaningful measurement and now we can go beyond surface-level metrics to show real campaign impact. It’s a major step forward for brands investing in creators," said Krishna Subramanian, CEO at Captiv8. 

Nielsen said the Outcomes Marketplace is available to clients immediately. More providers will be added to the marketplace in the future.

"Our Outcomes Marketplace is the latest example of how we are innovating to make it easier to measure what truly matters: real business results," said Nichole Henderson, GM of Global Campaign Analytics at Nielsen. "Working with industry leaders like Realeyes will allow our clients to seamlessly connect powerful metrics for quick, actionable insights of their campaigns' outcomes, all in an open, interoperable ecosystem. It’s one more way Nielsen is powering the future of measurement."

This is all coming at a time when just measuring audiences is becoming increasingly difficult as more viewers turn to streaming, further fragmenting the video world. 

Historically Nielsen measured viewing with its panel of 40,000 households. Startups like iSpot, Comscore and VideoAmp challenged Nielsen using “big data” from millions of set-top boxes and smart TVs to see what people are watching.

This year, Nielsen switched its methodology, rolling out a Big Data+Panel measurement system as the currency for the 2024-25 upfront. Despite some complaints, it seems that most buyers and sellers used Nielsen's Big Data+Panel as the primary currency in the upfront deals.

# # #

Streamers, who cut their teeth on video on demand, are adding more live content to lure the remaining traditional broadcast viewers.

Sports events, like NFL games and Mike Tyson fights,  have been migrating to streaming. Concerts too. Now Samsung TV Plus said it will be offering viewers free, exclusive “livestream experiences”  from five stops on The Jonas Brothers’
"Greeting From Your Hometown" tour. 

The Jonas concert will be appeari"ng on the new Samsung Television Network on Samsung TV Plus. 

“Partnering with the Jonas Brothers to livestream their upcoming tour on STN reflects our commitment to connecting audiences with the artists and stories they love, on the biggest screen in the home,” said Salek Brodsky, senior VP and global head of Samsung TV Plus. “With STN, we are not just launching the industry’s first FAST network, we’re creating a destination for exclusive fan-first experiences on Samsung TV Plus.” 

In addition to the Jonas concerts, the Samsung Television Network features series including Killing Eve, programming from David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, movies and live sports, including minor league baseball games.

# # #

Disney on Tuesday said that it completed its upfront negotiations with the total amount of advertising commitments for the 2025-26 season at about the same level as this year and big games in sports and streaming offsetting weakness at its traditional networks.

Sports has been a hot ticket at the upfront for all media companies fortunate enough to have the rights to the NFL, NBA and other key properties. (NBCUniversal, Fox and Netflix have previously announced being done with their upfronts.)

 For Disney, which owns ESPN, that translated into nearly $4 billion worth of upfront business across its linear and addressable platforms.

Disney said it saw double digit growth for Monday Night Football and college football, and for women’s sports, including the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament, the WNBA and emerging sports such as softball and volleyball.

Disney’s NBA games–plus Inside the NBA–generated high single-digit volume growth.

Overall Disney said it did 69 muliti-year sports deals.

With Disney+ and Hulu, streaming volume was up, and accounted for 40% of Disney’s upfront volume, about the same as last year. 

Live events, like the Oscars, the CMA Awards and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest were also coveted by advertisers. Advertisers snapped up twice as many units in the Oscars as they had in last year’s upfront. 

Disney said it expanded its business with independent agencies. Sports and streaming was a strong category, as were financial services, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals and beverages.

“As the velocity of change in the advertising landscape continues to accelerate, this upfront demonstrates the enduring power of storytelling, premium environments, and that the value of trusted relationships matter to marketers,” said Rita Ferro, president, global advertising at Disney. “Our strength in streaming and live events delivers results at scale, and we’re shaping what’s next for the entire industry.”