Nielsen makes a smart move, leaping towards unprecedented accuracy and simplicity in analytics.

In the media ecosystem, particularly for advertising on TV, it is critical for all parties involved to understand the users’ viewing behaviour. It is paramount because viewership insights are the key factor that Agencies and advertisers use to decide when and where to place their promotions.

We have long past the era when people had one television to watch for the entire family. And that too with only a handful of stations for them to select.

In this digital era, where the reach of smart TV is phenomenal, people have a myriad of options to choose from. They can watch their favourite shows whenever and wherever they want.

And this puts advertisers and businesses in a position to rely more on data and market measurement platforms so as to get accurate data for making further decisions.

And, recently in this landscape, a big team-up took place at Cannes 2023.

The renowned measurement company Nielsen has announced a collaboration with a competitor, EDO.

As part of the agreement, audience measurement data from Nielsen One will be accessible to mutual clients as input for EDO's predictive outcomes solution, and EDO's search outcomes measurement data will be available for Nielsen Media Impact planning software.

The initial stage of the integration will bring together Nielsen's national TV measurement with EDO’s convergent TV data, which includes cross-category watching ad airings as well as every national TV ad broadcast since 2015.

The combined datasets will be available in 2023 for linear planning and measurement, whereas for both linear and CTV measurements, advertisers must wait until 2024.

According to the companies, the combined data sets will enable US media buyers and sellers to structure and optimise convergent TV campaigns in a single, simplified ad measurement view, resulting in more precise analytics.

It is absolutely exciting news to catch up with for brands and advertisers.

We believe Nielsen has made a much more appreciable move by collaborating with EDO instead of acquiring it. Even though it is long-known for its TV ratings in the US, the company faced downtime at the beginning of the year.

Long story short, the discrepancies between Nielsen data and other measurement service providers were closely examined, and it eventually picked up some of its authority after the Media Rating Council restored the company's national TV ratings following a 19-month suspension. As an impact, Nielsen has received lots of dissatisfaction from advertisers, which has resulted in an increase in intense competition in this landscape.

Now, this smart move can hopefully give this measurement giant an uplift as this combined dataset looks to provide various benefits for the advertisers using both of these platforms.

In simple words, we see the partnership between Nielsen and EDO as a remarkable move and a successful strategy, as it can offer huge benefits and flexibilities for brands using these platforms. Going forward, we may expect more of this kind of collaboration in the measurement landscape.