Nielsen and Twitter Establish Social TV Rating
Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy, and Twitter today announced an exclusive multi-year agreement to create the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” for the US market.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen had already signaled ambitions to extend its role in video measurement through its “Video Cop” initiative in 2007. The Twitter agreement brings social conversation into that measurement agenda, rather than leaving program buzz as an unstandardized platform signal.
The exclusive, multi-year US arrangement gives the two companies a defined route to turn Twitter activity around television into a Nielsen-branded rating. Its broad pickup across technology, media and advertising outlets reflects the immediate relevance of a common social-TV metric to those markets.
First-order effects
- Nielsen and Twitter gain an exclusive framework for creating a US social-TV rating, tying Twitter’s television conversation to Nielsen’s measurement brand.
- TV programmers, advertisers and agencies receive a prospective common metric for evaluating Twitter discussion around programs rather than relying on disparate platform indicators.
Second-order effects
- Competing social platforms and TV-measurement providers face pressure to demonstrate whether their audience signals can be incorporated into media-planning workflows with comparable credibility.
- Networks can place greater commercial weight on programs that generate measurable social conversation, linking promotion and ad sales more closely to activity beyond the broadcast itself.
Third-order effects
- If buyers adopt the rating, television audience measurement shifts from counting viewing alone toward combining exposure with observable audience engagement across platforms.
- Exclusive data partnerships become a more important gatekeeper in media measurement, concentrating influence with the platforms that hold behavioral data and the firms trusted to standardize it.
The trend: Television measurement is expanding from viewership counts toward standardized cross-platform signals of audience engagement.