It was a great Super Bowl game this year with Patrick Mahomes leading a march down the field in overtime and bringing another championship to Kansas City. It wouldn’t matter if the game was a dud because we had the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce romance angle going on for the past few months. Even the NFL can’t buy that kind of publicity.
The ratings for the game were as spectacular as the game itself. Depending on which trade or consumer press account you read, this was the biggest Super Bowl audience ever and was second only to the 1969 moon landing in terms of viewers. One of the big questions has been how much audience Taylor Swift added? Of course, we’ll never have a quantifiable answer to that question.
There was another far less glamorous variable that increased the audience: PPM. You probably (hopefully) know that Nielsen added PPM to their video ratings a couple of years ago because, as we all know, people watch video in lots of places other than their homes. Bars, restaurants, airports, other public spaces, other homes, you name it. And Nielsen was never able to measure that viewing.
They did have a proxy for away-from-home viewing. In the old diary days, you were supposed to note any visitors to your home during the diary week and record what they viewed. With the people meter, you can add guests to your meter. Just record the age and sex and make sure the right buttons are pressed. But the whole media world, Nielsen included, knew this undercounted the audience, especially for live sports.
Nielsen did have an ace in the hole and that’s PPM. After much discussion and work, Nielsen was able to add PPM to local market TV reports in the markets that have PPM. No matter that DMAs and radio metros don’t quite match.
By the way, if you need a great trivia question, what two radio markets match up exactly with DMAs? The answer is San Diego and Providence. You’ll be the life of your next party with that one if your party is full of media research geeks. I’m still waiting for that question to come up during Tuesday Night Trivia at our local Mellow Mushroom. Yes, I know I’ll be waiting a long time.
Now think about all those thousands of PPMs on Super Bowl Sunday. They headed to friends’ homes for parties, to bars and restaurants, and who knows where else to catch glimpses of Taylor Swift. And for the first time, Nielsen could include all that viewing! Voila! Record Super Bowl viewing levels!
The PPM works so well for collecting out-of-home viewing that Nielsen announced on February 1 that they would add more PPMs to enable 100% coverage of the country. The additional panelists, using PPM wearables, alias the watch, will be ready in time for Super Bowl LIX, per Nielsen.
When PPM was born in the early ‘90s, Arbitron still measured television. After the company shut down the local television ratings operation in 1993, PPM work continued. At one point, there was hope for a joint venture with Nielsen to use PPM for both radio and television. An agreement was reached, the two companies worked together for a while, and when it came time to “put up or shut up”, to no great surprise, Nielsen decided to go in a different direction. A decade or so later, Nielsen bought Arbitron and with it, the rights to the PPM technology.
When I was at Arbitron, you’d occasionally hear a complaint from clients (among many other complaints) that radio was subsidizing television. The reasoning went that the R&D cost of the PPM was built into PPM pricing and since there was almost no revenue coming from other sources, PPM was funded by radio.
At the time, we tossed off the complaints. The vast majority of Arbitron’s revenue came from radio, so the development costs were legitimate. Now video is profiting from the PPM and Nielsen’s ability to collect away from home data.
In the meantime, Nielsen is expanding the panel. Since the words “radio” and “audio” were not mentioned in the release, apparently this panel expansion is of no benefit to the radio business.
PPM has been deployed commercially for over 15 years (depending on which PPM market you’re in) for radio and is now being used successfully for the video business. During your next contract renewal negotiation with Nielsen, you may want to ask what part of the PPM development costs are being borne by the video business. Perhaps a lower contract rate would be in order. Wouldn’t that be something?
Let’s meet again next week.
