Happy Hour: Now With Nielsen Ratings

Do you watch sports in a bar? If you do, congratulations; starting in 2017, you’ll be counted by Nielsen.  One of the major announcements from ESPN during its upfront was that the Nielsen Total Audience Measurement (TAM) initiative, which we have previously discussed at length, will count Out Of Home (OOH) viewership for the first time in their linear metrics.Nielsen has spent time studying OOH in the past – a 2014 study found that for some types of programing, ratings could be lifted as high as 9%. For primetime sports, the rise could be as much as 14%, indicating that an eighth of the audience is watching with other people or at a bar. The lifts are visible in other genres as well, but sports can see the largest increases. This was reiterated earlier this year when Nielsen put out a release right before the Super Bowl reminding readers that the NFL saw a 19% lift in viewership when OOH was counted.That ESPN is interested in getting these ratings added into their numbers should not come as a surprise– according to preliminary findings, the ESPN OOH audience is “younger, more female, more multicultural and attentive.” Being able to go to advertisers with these additional numbers is a major win for ESPN, which wryly noted, "No one ever says, 'Let's go to the sports bar and watch a Ken Burns documentary.'"How they plan on measuring this remains to be seen – will it be counted by bar capacity? Will bars that play games on mute be counted the same as bars with volume on the games? Will the number of screens per bar be counted as part of their panel definition? And will wearing a rally cap with #rallykeet count for more viewership?As TAM adds more features, it becomes more reliable. As we discussed in the TAM article, by increasing the panel size and counting OTT content beyond the C7 window, Nielsen has acknowledged there are changes in how people watch content. And now that OOH viewing is being counted, Nielsen can finally admit that tentpole events like the Super Bowl and the World Series are likely to be even bigger ratings draws once natural viewer behavior is taken into account.