Nielsen Introduces Persons-Based Advanced Audiences

Fast forward to 2005. My partners and I in that year created TRA, a company that used set top box data (I had developed STB data to be an audience measurement method ten years earlier) matched with purchase data on the same household to create advanced audiences based on sample sizes a thousand times larger than the ones BRI used. TRA and Datalogix created modern, advanced audiences across both TV and digital. And then, everyone started creating advanced audiences.

These advanced audiences have to this day been almost totally based on household audiences not persons audiences in television, and a muddle of device level (browsers, device IDs, IP addresses), persons level (hashed email addresses), and household level in digital.

Nielsen has put together its ID graph informed by nearly ten carefully selected ID graphs and about 20 spine-to-spine integrations with major media platforms. For years they refined their estimates of the people in the households, and this process will probably continue forever. Currently, they provide clients with respondent-level data on 250 million U.S. adults and also provide advanced audiences on that same sample. Other clients who prefer to use all the digital IDs available can get Nielsen advanced audiences based on 400 million U.S. IDs. The 250 million advanced audiences are at the persons level, not the household level, although Nielsen knows which people cluster into which households. But it is people who watch ads and buy things, so Nielsen focuses on the persons level advanced audiences.

This is a whole new thing for the industry. Before reading about it here, you might not have been aware of this.

What is its significance? Is it important? Are persons level advanced audiences better than household level advanced audiences? Why would they be?

In order to answer these questions for myself and to share my opinions with you, I asked Nielsen to run a few reports, and they did.

I wondered about reach and frequency, especially for products that are bought for and used by specific household members, where it should make a big difference whether you reach the actual users or just reach the household by reaching some other family members. I imagined two products – a deodorant aimed at males 21-39 (my company RMT had done work for a brand like that, so I knew the exact sex/age target), and a hair coloring product aimed at females 35-54.

Nielsen Ad Intel found very recent real campaigns for brands like those, and ran reach/frequency reports on NPower for the TV and CTV vehicles bought within those campaigns. At my request, they ran each campaign two ways:

1. Persons level, e.g., reach and frequency among males 21-39.
2. Household level, e.g., reach and frequency among households with males 21-39.

Let’s look at the results. If the results are pretty similar between persons level and household level, then the introduction of persons level advanced audiences is not such a big deal. But if the results are quite different, then Nielsen has really just made a big improvement in advanced audiences.

Here are the results for the male 21-39 brand:

Here are the results for the female 35-54 brand:

In both cases, the use of “households with” a specific target gave results far different from the specific persons target itself. This means that if an advanced audience of any kind is targeted at the household level, it will overstate the degree to which the right person was reached and with what frequency level, because in many cases, reaching the household meant that others in the household were reached but not the actual user of your product. If it’s important for you to know that you are reaching the actual consumer of your product, then you should be happy that there’s now a way to do that, and you can do it with any advanced audience you want, whether it’s your own first party data or third party data on buyers or intenders or whatever. Decide who in the household you want to reach – adults, or men, or women, or anyone 12+, or whatever you decide.

This analysis for convenience was done on TV+CTV but the Nielsen persons level advanced audiences can be planned, optimized, activated, post post-evaluated across linear, CTV, mobile, and computer, across all television/video and digital platform types.

Specify exactly what you want and you will get it. Leave nothing to chance, especially in uncertain times.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.