With Super Bowl 50 on the horizon this Sunday, I was reminded of live broadcasts and the powerful role they play in the media industry. Last year’s Super Bowl scored over 114.5 million viewers—delivering record ratings for the event. 114.5 million viewers is an impressive turnout but this all comes down to money. Ratings are synonymous to currency in the TV programming industry—as billions of advertising dollars are traded every year in relation to primetime broadcast. Since the 1950’s Nielsen has been collecting statistics on TV audience demographics and viewing habits. Today, in 2016, executives of large networks still turn to Nielsen when making decisions about a TV show’s livelihood.
But what has been going on with Nielsen lately? In 2014, the TV ratings company partnered with Adobe to create an alternative measurement platform for digital content. However this partnership and the analytics it provides doesn't appear to be having a strong impact on Wall Street. All in all, Nielsen has not evolved. They still cannot accurately represent cross-platform ratings or capture the fragmented viewing habits of modern day audiences-thus potentially under evaluating the industry's market potential.
Nevertheless now that the anticipated merger between comScore (the Internet, mobile measurement mogul) and Rentrak (the movie audience tracking firm) is finalized, the advertising industry is more excited than ever—anxiously hoping for a game changer in our cross-platform society. Nielsen ratings still proves to be decent indicators for live events like the Super Bowl or the Grammy's but we all know viewership of programming is continuing to move in a new direction. With the rising numbers of "cord cutters", how long will it take until media buyers don't primarily rely on Nielsen to make money? I am eager to see if comScore can help revitalize the relationship between the worlds of TV and advertising.