In 2024, Nielsen announced a massive change to the way it calculates its PPM radio ratings, by shifting the qualifying time from five minutes in a quarter-hour down to three.
The change in methodology — like many topics in the radio sphere, especially when it comes to ratings — drew plenty of reactions, ranging from celebration to skepticism.
The implementation came with the industry, its health, and its collaboration at heart. Jon Miller, the Vice President of Audience Insights at Nielsen, noted how Herculean a task such as changing something as significant as the qualifying time is for a company of Nielsen’s magnitude.
“Nielsen is a great company that does a lot of great stuff, but, we are a bit of a battleship. It’s hard to turn quickly,” said Miller. “We brought this idea sort of from conception to implementation in about 30 weeks. About half a year, really. That’s a huge accomplishment. It came about from working with our internal data science folks to figure out: is this feasible? Can we do it? What does it mean?
“But more importantly, working with the industry as a whole. It was everybody from the Radio Advertising Bureau, the c-suite executives at our largest clients, the Media Ratings Council, which is the governing body for what we do. It was a really extraordinary effort. We are so pleased that we were able to take something from an idea last spring, and then we met about it in the summer with our clients, and we went through the process of impact data and all the reviews and looking at everything. And here we are, February 2025. It’s rolling out. It’s live in the industry. So we’re extremely proud of that. We’re really excited about it.”
Miller shared that it was something that Nielsen had been considering themselves, especially when juxtaposed against what is considered an impression in digital metrics.
“It was something that we’ve been thinking about internally, but then it was the customer base that kept coming to us and saying, ‘In the current world of audio use, are we doing the best job capturing and crediting the way radio is being used, especially when you compare it to other media?’
“That was a really big selling point. If you look around, the way certain digital platforms are credited — the way an impression gets counted somewhere else — on TikTok, for example, a couple of seconds of exposure counts as an impression. And yet, here’s radio using a five-minute rule that’s 70 years old. Does that make sense? So we talked about it, worked through it, and used data to guide us, which is the way Nielsen does it.”
While using three minutes as a qualifying time might seem like an arbitrary number, it actually was figuratively smacking Nielsen in its face.
“Of all of the uncredited occasions that we see in the PPM markets, the median length is three minutes,” Miller shared. “So that was like a blinking red light of like, ‘You know what? Maybe that makes sense to go to that number’, right? This gets us, again, more in line with current digital currencies.
“It credits more impressions, it gives advertisers more credit for audiences to commercials that we weren’t necessarily including, and it gives programmers the ability to do things a little bit differently, because it changes the rules a little bit. We think it’s a win across the board. And it was really a great collaboration between us and our client base and the industry to make it happen.”
Jon Miller added that one of the largest hurdles in making such a change is figuring out whether there was any code or currency changes needed. However, it proved to be quite simple since it was a rule change on how the company tabulates the ratings rather than some massive change in methodology and technology.
Despite some early apprehension and criticism, Miller said the changes have been praised.
“It was generally very positively received. Of course, the radio clients are excited about it and in favor of it. And the agencies are too, because we pitched it as you’re buying different types of audio platforms. You’re buying different types of platforms. We want to try to try to make things easier to buy,” he said. “You want to make it easier to get credit for the impressions. That’s a win for everybody: the advertiser or the agency.
“So there wasn’t a large amount of pushback. A lot of questions, of course, as there is when you do something like this. But in general, top to bottom, broadcaster, agency, committee, it was very positive. That’s one reason we were able to do it in a half year. Sometimes things can take years to roll as you have to go through all these committees to make it happen. We got it done in less than half a year.”
In the data Nielsen collected as reasoning for the change, it shared that it expected a 24% increase in ratings with the change from five minutes down to three. With the very early returns of the data, Nielsen has seen exactly what it projected.
“In general, the results are absolutely in line with what we expected. We went through a whole process last year where we actually reprocessed a whole survey month and did a side by side, here’s what you got with the five-minute currency, here’s what it would have been with the new rule. And so that really was a great guide for us to anticipate what’s happening. And what I can tell you is all the changes we saw in that impact data is generally what we’re seeing now: 20+% higher audience levels from an average audience basis.
“Across the board, results, of course, are varying, mileage varies by market, station, unique situation, but again, we’re seeing what we expecting to see. What you get when you do this is you’re finding those lifts and audiences are generally coming from capturing more listening from the same panelists.”
Miller added that time spent listening is going up more so than a station’s cume, and there’s a logical reason for that.
“We are capturing more audience because there are people that listen in short bursts, especially younger listeners who might only be there for two or three minutes because that’s the way you use all your media now. It’s so fast-paced and there’s so many things coming at you. So we are capturing some new listeners, but in general, the majority of it is we’re getting longer occasions.
“We’re getting a few more minutes that we wouldn’t have credited previously because of the rules, and now we’re getting those. So time spent listening is going up more than cume is, and those are the two things that flow into the average audience.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
