TV and broadband behemoth Comcast Corporation has decided to renew its deal with media measurement titan Nielsen, in spite of its past reservations. This updated multi-year agreement allows Nielsen to continue licensing Comcast’s proprietary return path data. The agreement’s renewal is significant for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it subtly expresses Comcast’s confidence in Nielsen, particularly at a juncture when Comcast’s NBCUniversal division, along with other prominent TV-focused media organizations, has been supporting various alternative currencies to rival Nielsen in the ad market.
Secondly, this comes as Nielsen is experiencing a decrease in the representativeness of the Big Data sources, a crucial part of its new Nielsen One service set to replace its traditional panel-based measurement service as the default currency in the ad marketplace.
In recent times, due to the phasing out of cookies, consumer identity trackers, and assorted privacy policies and regulations, some of these sources – notably the social media titan Meta – have become less reflective of the demographic they were supposed to represent.
Comcast’s return-path data, with a reach of nearly 45 million subscriber households, is one of the most significant and representative sources of consumer media usage data. It is a critical element of Nielsen One for both national and local audience-measurement services.
Nielsen Audience Measurement CEO Karthik Rao said in a statement this morning announcing the renewal, “We are delighted to extend our strategic partnership with Comcast allowing us to continue to embrace the power of big data for our services both locally across nearly 100 markets and nationally with addressable measurement.”
He added, “This agreement dually reinforces the importance big data plays in our work and Nielsen’s deep commitment to delivering accurate measurement that helps our clients make informed decisions in an increasingly complex media landscape.”
According to the agreement’s terms, Nielsen will broaden its use of Comcast’s return-path data to incorporate Comcast RPD for local TV measurement across all of the 94 media markets starting next year.
