The study, conducted with ad targeting firm Simulmedia, contains
plenty of insights, but among the most striking is the size of either industry.
Nielsen rarely pulls back the veil on exactly how big the TV and video worlds
are (they do mint the currency in the former, after all), but here it is in
black and white: There are 283 million television viewers monthly (the
population of the United States is 313 million), each watching an average of
146 hours of TV. Compare that with 155 million online video viewers averaging
just shy of six hours monthly on mobile and almost six and a half hours over
the Web. So while TV’s audience is still almost twice that of digital video,
the amount of money in digital isn’t even 5 percent of the mammoth $74 billion
chunk of change in television. What’s going to bring about growth in the
former, said Amit Seth, Nielsen’s evp, global media products, is equivalency.
ABC already offers digital options for audience
deficiency units (ADUs, or makegoods), and Fox said last year it would provideHulu inventory
for the same purpose (neither network was able to provide comment by press
time), but Seth said he foresees greater porousness between digital video and
TV. The company isn’t just hoping for that—Nielsen’s DPR product, which
measures non-mobile streaming video, is set to finally launch in the spring
after a delay. Nielsen also will be continuing to refine a tool that other
third-party data miners are already selling: purchaser data that gives a
measurable ROI to advertisers. “We have access to 90-plus percent of credit
card transactions, anonymized through a third-party data provider,” said Seth.
“Do you shop home improvement? If so, do you shop at Home Depot or at Lowe’s?”
Nielsen now knows.
Content producers likeNBCUniversal have
pioneered similar initiatives, but it’s impossible to overstate the importance
of third-party measurement as the analytics world gets more complicated. Lest
this sound like too much progress too quickly, Dave Morgan, founder and CEO of
Simulmedia, says not to worry. Business as usual will probably continue apace
for a while. “The silos aren’t coming down anytime soon,” said Morgan. “There’s
a Silicon Valley expectation that there will be a desilo-ization of TV
imminently, and nobody who took part in these dinners and discussions, not even
the most ardent online people, thinks that’s the case.”
Morgan and Seth agree that the industry’s best hope is
in more granular data. “The fuzzy intermedia metrics can lead to nothing but
more debates at the ARF and the 4A’s and the NAB and forever,” said Morgan.
“But what you can’t argue with is what happened after they saw the ad. What
happened at the cash register?”
