Why Nielsen's New Out-of-Home Ratings May Undercount

Over at MediaPost, David Goetzl writes about the relative success of Nielsen's new ratings system, which I wrote about earlier this month, that tracks television viewers even when the viewer is not in their home.

Using a James Bond-worthy technique of passing out cell phones to a sample of 2,500, the phones track ambient noise to determine when a viewer is around a television, and what they're watching, Nielsen was able to determine that an additional 831,000 people were watching ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcast outside of their home. With 8.4 million watching within the home, the additional 831,000 out of home viewers meant a jump of ten percent in total viewers -- a number that allows ESPN to argue pretty persuasively about the increased value of its inventory.

But Goetzl makes the astonishingly simple and yet overlooked fact that Nielsen's method may still not be getting all the viewers. The technique relies of cell phones picking up the audio from broadcasts. As Goetzl writes:

But the operative word is "audio." If the TV is on, but the sound off--viewing (or exposure) is not picked up. And it's not counted in the OOH ratings.

It's hard to argue that a mass amount (if not the majority) of viewing at bars is done with the sound muted. So, that's likely a huge chunk of audience that is not part of the OOH figures. [...]

How much more the increase would have been if "sound-off" viewing in watering holes were attached is a guessing game, but a few hundred thousand may not be out of the question.

While ESPN is happy with what it can get, this illuminates the difficulty broadcasters and publishers are increasingly facing as the media landscape grows more fractured. Forget watching at a bar versus watching at home -- think of the myriad ways I might take in content from a broadcaster. Sitting at home in front of my television, watching 30 Rock on NBC, I catch a tagline message telling to check out extra content at NBC.com. I pull out my laptop and go the NBC.com to look at some behind the scenes clips. I then remember I missed an earlier episode, and download it from iTunes. NBC currently has absolutely no way of knowing that I'm the same person who in front of the television a few minutes earlier, then on its website, and then downloading content from iTunes. It should -- that data would be extremely valuable.

Things like Comcast-led Project Canoe, or NBC's own deal with Google, point towards ways this could change, but as consumers move increasingly rapidly across mediums, the ability to track consumers will grow increasingly important.