For nearly 10 years, Nielsen has been capturing out-of-home viewing in such locales as airports, hotels, bars and restaurants. Now, with Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday (2/11), the audience measurement and data analytics company says it is expanding coverage of its national TV OOH panel across 2024 “in order to fully represent all U.S. TV households.”
This, Nielsen says, will see the addition of new homes to its “PPM Wearables” footprint, boosting OOH coverage from its current 65% to what Nielsen believes will be 100% coverage.
“Capturing this viewing audience is critical for genres of television that people tend to watch communally, particularly sporting events, which continue to grow as one the most important programming genres in live television,” Nielsen notes, adding that its data show that in 2023, fans in the U.S. spent more than 1.7 trillion minutes watching games from the five most-watched sports leagues.
And, Nielsen adds, as people’s consumption of streaming TV grows, the importance of measuring live sports and other “appointment” viewing on both linear and streaming also grows. “With streaming services increasingly tapping into the live sports space, there is additional demand for measurement of this audience,” Nielsen says.
Deirdre Thomas, Chief Product Officer for Audience Measurement at Nielsen, comments, “We understand how important it is for our clients to be able to have the most complete picture of the audience, especially for special events like the Super Bowl.”
Paul Ballew, chief data and analytics officer of the National Football League, says the NFL is “appreciative of Nielsen’s efforts to make out-of-home measurement more complete, providing a much clearer picture of the true audience for all television viewing and especially sports viewership. For years we have been consistent in our belief that major sports events, like the upcoming Super Bowl LVIII, are often viewed with family and friends in large gatherings and this expanded out-of-home viewership will be crucial to measuring those events.”
