Nielsen’s Super Bowl audience errors
“Errors that led Nielsen to restate Fox Super Bowl audience numbers are also having broader impact,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports, “leading to reprocessing of data in 12 local markets and raising questions about how much value the company’s recently restored Media Rating Council accreditation brings.”
The details: “Nielsen sent a letter to clients May 2 that it will reprocess local TV data in 12 of its 44 Portable People Meter markets across the U.S. after finding the error that led to undercounting out-of-home viewing of the Super Bowl broadcast also had affected broader local ratings,” Neff notes. “Those markets include Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Norfolk (Virginia), Pittsburgh, Providence (Rhode Island) and San Antonio.”
Essential context: “While big in absolute terms because it involved the Super Bowl, each error represented less than 1% of the average minute audience for the game, so might easily be missed for the vast majority of lower-rated programming,” Neff adds. “Collectively, however, the adjustments Nielsen made, were they to apply across a U.S. TV market estimated by various researchers at $65 billion to $68 billion, would come to more than $1 billion.
Keep reading here.
