Advanced Television

Nielsen expands Total Audience across local markets

September 27, 2018

Nielsen has announced an expansion of its Total Audience capability for local measurement of ads and content across all 210 local designated market areas (DMAs) in the US. This custom solution leverages key Nielsen Total Audience solutions, including Digital Ad Ratings, Total Ad Ratings and Digital Content Ratings, to measure reach, frequency, and GRP performance for ads and content across digital and TV at the local market level. This is in addition to the inclusion of linear measurement contributions from virtual multi-channel video distributors (vMVPDs) directly to local TV ratings from earlier this year.

“By enabling our clients to demonstrate the total reach they can deliver to advertisers at the local market level, local television can access the same key metrics as national television to know how their media is working,” said Kelly Abcarian, SVP Product Leadership, Nielsen. “This helps to better inform their sales strategy and enables effective decision-making about where and when to engage audiences with content and advertising on a local level.”

Nielsen Total Ad Ratings measures total and incremental reach for all audiences, regardless of device or platform distribution, for any advertising campaign across TV, computer and mobile platforms, and will include OTT impressions in 2019. Total Ad Ratings uses industry-standard inputs—namely Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings data—coupled with Nielsen TV ratings data, to deliver reporting of de-duplicated persons-level campaign audiences. Now available for local markets, it provides a view of deduplicated reach on TV, digital and combined—showing the incremental value that digital can provide to audiences within a target DMA region or set of DMA regions.

With the availability of Local Nielsen Media Impact in August and Total Ad Ratings for local markets today, buyers and sellers have the tools they need to better understand the local media landscape so that they can build and execute a media plan on the best properties and combinations of media channels to achieve their reach and frequency goals down to the DMA level. This is another step Nielsen is taking in applying the Total Audience measurement framework to enhance our measurement coverage and unify premium video across any and all screens. As viewership continues to increase across digital and connected devices, having independent measurement of ads and content across screens is more important than ever.

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