Nielsen's Kelly Abcarian Wants to Marry the Panel and the Impression

This Addressable video brought to you by Project OAR, the consortium of media companies aligned to bring standards for addressable advertising in linear TV. Learn more about the consortium here.

So, we’re moving into an addressable future. Great! We’re making strides toward properly measuring that addressable audience. Awesome!

...But what exactly does that mean? Kelly Abcarian, Nielsen’s GM of Advanced Video Advertising, has been answering that question for a while now. 

“One of the biggest challenges holding back the linear addressable today is being able to reconcile the currency that's out there,” Abcarian tells TVREV, referring to the current state of play in the TV ad world: Nielsen’s gross ratings points (GRPs) function as the currency for most of the marketplace. But Nielsen’s linear TV data is panel-based, drawn from a 40,000-household representative sample, whereas the addressable ad data is more akin to digital.

“Panels will serve a critical role to help calibrate and clean the big data and help it understand who the real people are that are sitting behind those devices,” Abcarian says. “Because big data is just that — it just tells you what device saw what advertisement, or delivered what content. It doesn't tell you who was in the room, how many people were in the room, and for how long did those people view.”

The next big step into that bright addressable future, then, is to marry those two information sets. It’s no easy feat, but it’s also not impossible.

Watch the video of our chat with Abcarian below. And check out our really in-depth chat about addressable with Abcarian as well.

How do we actually measure addressable?

Kelly Abcarian: Well, you know, one of the biggest challenges holding back the linear addressable today is being able to reconcile the currency that's out there.

Nielsen feels very privileged to provide to the industry a one media truth across $80 billion-plus of advertising spending. And to that end, being able to allow the industry to have the flexibility to change out the ad loads during that three and seven day window is key. So that, as those ads get replaced, being able to ensure that the underlying ad to that original buyer is reflected of the impressions and time that they actually were served is done in a transparent, independent and unbiased way.

So, Nielsen will continue to evolve our total audience initiative to ensure that we can provide unbiased metrics deduplicated across all inventory sources to enable the industry to transact with confidence just like they do today.

How can panels and big data work together?

KA: So as the world of the addressable unlocks, it'll be key to bring together panels and big data. But panels will serve a critical role to help calibrate and clean the big data and help it understand who the real people are that are sitting behind those devices. Because big data is just that — it just tells you what device saw what advertisement, or delivered what content.

It doesn't tell you who was in the room, how many people were in the room, and for how long did those people view. We're working to bring together a reconciliation process that enables buyers and sellers to execute in a transparent way so that you can understand who the viewers were for that solid linear ad and who the viewers were that got the addressable impressions across the entire U.S.