Nielsen's New Wearable Meter Looks To Tap 'Lower Compliance' Panelists
- by Wayne Friedman , August 5, 2021
New “wearables” will help Nielsen modernize its portable people meter (PPM) to be used as support for the upcoming Nielsen One service, its all-encompassing cross-media measurement platform.
Some 3,000 of these smaller wearables will be a “subset” of nearly 60,000 active PPM panelists, according to the company. PPM has been …
Wayne, if the "gloves" do not require their wearers to indicate whether they are "watching" whatever program content the devices identify as being on-screen we still have the same problem as with the PPM, namely "viewing" is assumed---not measured. This may not be so bad for high involvement dramas seen at home on regular TV sets but its highly problematic when the device thinks that a person is "viewing" out-of-home content---say at a bar on in a hotel room. And this assumption---inherent in the PPM system---- is especially inflationary for commercials at all locations---OOH in particular. Poor Nielsen, it gets beat up because it "understated" viewing by 2-5% during the pandemic's first year but nobody seems to care that it consistently overstates "average commercial minute viewers" by about 100-150% by assuming that unless told otherwise---which almost never happens---that folks are "watching" the commercials.. Sometimes you just can't win.