A single home in the rural southeastern U.S. stands at the center of a growing rift between Nielsen and the Spanish-language broadcasting giant whose audiences it measures.
Executives at TelevisaUnivision are livid about a quirk in Nielsen’s process of tabulating the audiences for Spanish-language TV that they say is giving rival Telemundo a significant boost in estimates of young male viewers tuning into news shows and other programming,
But the lifts, these people say, are based on Nielsen’s reliance on one household where five Spanish-speaking residents have no access to TelevisaUnivision’s stations, just Telemundo’s. And Nielsen’s extrapolation of that home’s activity has created inaccurate audience estimates that TelevisaUnivision believes could hurt its prospects heading into the “upfront” market, when U.S. media companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming.
“For them to not act on the anomaly right now of this data is unacceptable,” says Donna Speciale, president of U.S. advertising sales and marketing at TelevisaUnivision, during an interview. She adds: “They are not acting quickly and that has huge ramifications for our business.”
“We are aware of the client’s feedback and we are in direct, continuous communication with them,” Nielsen said in a statement. “Nielsen stands by its panel and methodology. We also take feedback very seriously. We are committed to continuing to research the situation.”
Spanish-language TV is one of the hotter parts of the media market, even as more viewers overall leave traditional TV in favor of streaming. The Spanish-speaking population of the U.S. has been growing, and viewers of Univision in the U.S. and Telemundo are viewed as important constituents whose needs and interests can affect the outcome of political campaigns. Over the past few years, Speciale has worked to gain new ad commitments from Madison Avenue, particularly marketers that have not spent heavily on Spanish media.
The schism takes place just as Nielsen is hoping to prove its reliability after a difficult period. The measurement giant last week won accreditation from the Media Rating Council, an industry monitor, for a new “Panel + Big Data” offering that will incorporate audience interactions with cable and satellite set-top boxes and smart TVs across 45 million households and 75 million devices. Nielsen is backing the new product as the basis for “currency” for negotiations between media outlets and advertisers. It has also won accreditation to use first-party data from various media outlets in calculating its ratings.
Even so, executives at many media companies remain wary of Nielsen. During the coronavirus pandemic, complaints about Nielsen undercounting audiences spurred a loss of accreditation for its national ratings service for months; it has since been regained. Paramount Global, for example, declined last year to renew its contract with the measurement company, citing costs and the availability of other measurement vendors that were able to wrap science around the issue of counting audience that have migrated to streaming venues. Paramount has been relying on VideoAmp, a Nielsen rival, and many of its contemporaries have struck pacts with that company as well.
The fracas between TelevisaUnivsion and Nielsen is surprising, because Speciale has in the past backed Nielsen’s efforts to incorporate the new data and add it to its panel. “I’m the one that’s been screaming to the top” about adopting the technology, the executive says.
TelevisaUnivision started noticing discrepancies in ratings just after the start of the year, noting surges in Telemundo’s young male audiences, particularly for news programming. When executives asked for more details, they found the cause of the ratings hike was a single home in the southeastern U.S., where residents of a rural home only have access to over-the-air TV.
When TelevisaUnivsion probed more deeply, executives gained assurances that Nielsen would remove the home from the panel so that the discrepancies could be studied. After one weekend, the effect the home was having on ratings was clear, because TelevisaUnivision’s coverage of the presidential inauguration fared better in ratings. Then Nielsen informed TelevisaUnivision it would be putting the home back into its audience panel.
“We brought this anomaly of data to their attention in private. We did not want to raise this at all. We did it in private, tried to get them to dig into this. They agreed that something’s wrong. They agreed to take it down, then put it back up,” says Speciale. “My issue is really the timing, because they’re not saying they’re not changing it, but they’re saying they need time. And I’m sorry, we don’t have time.”
Telemundo, which is part of NBCUniversal, declined to comment.
