Future of TV Briefing: Media Rating Council identifies ‘the problem of our time’ for measurement

The Media Rating Council (MRC) is focusing on how to identify audiences across media properties and channels in a privacy-safe manner. This involves ensuring that measurement systems can reliably identify individual viewers to avoid duplicative counting and provide accurate unique reach measurements, while also carving up audiences based on specific attributes like interests and purchase behaviors. The MRC is also turning its attention to how privacy regulations intersect with its measurement standards.

Cross-media measurement faces several challenges in the privacy-focused landscape, including:

• Accounting for individual viewers to avoid duplicative counting and ensure reliable unique reach measurements.
• Moving beyond age-and-gender-based measurement to include more specific audience attributes.
• Measuring across different media companies' properties and channels, which requires associating ad views on one device with purchases on another.
• Adapting to the growing drumbeat of privacy regulation, which impacts how identity and measurement can be conducted.

The MRC is actively auditing measurement companies' identity methodologies and providing feedback to industry organizations as they develop cross-media measurement systems. This includes unpacking issues for members in audit reports and evaluating approaches to ensure the identity framework underpinning measurement can adapt to today's privacy era. The MRC plans to revisit the identity section and requirements of its measurement standards to reflect the current challenges and changes in the industry.

According to Nielsen's The Gauge viewership report, there was a 3% decline in total TV watch time from February to March, which is a typical trend after the Super Bowl-fueled February. Broadcast TV experienced a significant dip of 6%, while cable TV gained a 0.7 percentage point share of total watch time. Streaming saw a smaller decline of 1% but increased its lead by 0.8 percentage points. Over the past three years, cable TV has lost 11.2 percentage points in watch time, while streaming has gained over 12 percentage points, partly due to the rise of free, ad-supported streaming TV services.