Nielsen is trusting Amazon and using the company’s data in reporting viewership for Thursday Night Football this season. That makes Jeff Bezos and company happy. The competition, however, is less than thrilled.
Media Rights Council can approve the plan at a meeting on Wednesday. The plan has been audited for accuracy and that has network television executives and the Video Advertising Bureau raising questions.
A spokesman for the VAB, a trade group for network television, questions the speed of the audit. The group is also questioning the fairness of the practice.
“Having DNA-level factors that are inherently biased baked into the system is putting [Amazon] at an advantage,” VAB CEO Sean Cunningham said. “That’s not fair to the other players, especially since there hasn’t been any constructive engagement from the co-authors of this.”
He added that Nielsen has been “completely opaque” regarding how Amazon’s numbers are measured and how they are incorporated into overall audience measurement.
Amazon has denied that it has tipped the scales in its favor with the plan. It should be noted however, that in 2022, the company’s internal reporting estimated audiences 18% larger for the average Thursday night game than what Nielsen showed.
Cunningham says this is an example of Nielsen putting “its thumb on the scale” for Amazon. Linear networks have tried to strike similar deals for audience measurement in the past only to be rebuffed.
Sean McManus addressed the controversy on an NFL on CBS media call on Tuesday.
“A fair and accurate audience measurement across all platforms is absolutely vital to our industry,” the CBS Sports chairman said. “Anything that is not impartial and unbiased is unacceptable to us. I must say that we think it’s extremely odd and unfortunate that different rules are suddenly applying to one platform, and I’ll leave it at that.”
“Nielsen is committed to evolving our methodologies to provide the most accurate measurement of what the audience is watching,” a company statement from Nielsen announcing the move reads. “We are making modifications for live streaming measurement to more accurately reflect the growing impact of streaming and first party data. We will continue to leverage newer data sets as they become available in order to drive our measurement capabilities forward, with the ultimate goal of counting and reporting the viewing habits of everyone, everywhere.”
Nielsen has said that streaming data from platforms will be used only to measure the audience for live events.
