Nielsen has rejected participating in a request for information and certification process from the Joint Industry Committee, which includes NBCU and most other major network players in addition to Roku and agency representatives. And, following an exchange of letters and talks, the remaining sticking point for the company participating with the JIC is its demand that all JIC-certified measurement companies be MRC accredited, not that they simply seek accreditation, as required by the JIC, according to people familiar with the matter.
More news: Media companies pressed to open up walled gardens
Beyond the PPM coding issue, which has been fixed, audio encoding is something network clients enable to allow Nielsen to measure, a Nielsen spokesman said, adding that it’s up to the MRC to discuss that process with publishers.
He said the PPM issue was unrelated to accreditation, but that “MRC accreditation requires us to restate and disclose when errors are uncovered, which supports transparency and trust in the media industry.”
The accreditation process, “is a comprehensive review of all components, methodologies and processes,” he said, to ensure that a company “meets a rigorous set of standards that yield a consistent set of data that the user can rely on as representative of the general universe.”
The MRC process dictates that material errors are disclosed to customers, a spokesman for the MRC said. “That’s why you see Nielsen and Comscore occasionally making these kinds of disclosures,” he said. “Other (non-audited) services don’t generally do this for the customer base. It’s not because they don’t make mistakes.”
