What you need to know:

• Nielsen scrambling to replace a cookie-based methodology to de-duplicate users across the multiple screens and devices they use that Facebook’s database once provided.
• Amid local fallout, with the IAB putting the provider on notice, MD Monique Perry admits Nielsen could have been more transparent about its challenges.
• Backing Nielsen's new global ID system to re-enamour local market.

It’s been a brutal month for Nielsen Media in Australia and local boss Monique Perry says she would do things differently if she had her time again.

“Basically, post-cookies, everyone is injured,” she told Mi3 in a candid interview on why the company was “absolutely” joining the battle to retain the IAB’s digital measurement tender in Australia.

Perry also detailed what the group’s future measurement looked like as it races to build a global Nielsen ID system to replace the now scrapped alliance with Facebook and its 15 million user database of Australians.

“There’s been a lot of reporting in recent weeks and everyone’s been very transparent as we realise just how enormous this digital injury is with the end of cookies and how it impacts all of us,” she said.

“On reflection, we were possibly a little too internally focused. If I had my time again, I would spend more time taking our clients on that journey and trying to be a little more transparent about where we were at, what we were solving for and what we’ve solved for.”

Nielsen’s biggest challenge is replacing a cookie-based methodology to de-duplicate users across the multiple screens and devices they use that Facebook’s database once provided. Facebook pulled that alliance late last year, citing privacy governance, and Perry says Nielsen globally has been working on an alternative for all of 2020. 

In the Australian transition, it has scrapped its content and ad ratings services and is now relying on a panel of 10,000 users to determine website details like time spent on site, page views and the more contentious monthly audience rankings.

Paper losses

Reversion to panel-only data, and the resulting break in methodology, has seen some publishers and mastheads hit with 25% declines in their monthly user numbers. 

Perry says the next iteration is re-building Nielsen’s database back to circa 10 million users in Australia as it prepares to retain the IAB contract with a new ID system.

“2020 was such a critical year between the things we had to solve for and the [Facebook] separation – we were too internally focused,” she said. “Any of the feedback I get about our client focus is fair feedback. We can do better.”

After Nielsen returned to its panel-only data last month, Perry says the focus now is to deliver “more granularity” of publisher and user data with its own ID system that approaches 10 million users here. 

“Nielsen has been building the Nielsen ID system, which is a way of on-boarding datasets in a privacy-first scenario that allows us to build back up a larger sample scale,” she says. “You start with the framework where we put in all the Nielsen data assets and what we know, and then we’ll layer in global data partnerships that we have in a privacy-safe environment. Then, market by market, we’ll put in local datasets that allow us to build back up to the scale we had with the third party data provider [Facebook]. It won’t ever be that big," Perry admits, "but it enables the scale we need to get the granularity we need in the data.”

It’s this methodology Nielsen aims to lay out to the IAB in its tender for a new measurement partner. 

“What we’ve released recently is what we can deliver in market for 2021," said Perry. "It provided continuity of measurement while we work on a longer-term solution.”

With rivals like Roy Morgan just winning the newsmedia industry’s readership contract at the expense of Ipsos, the radio industry paddling fast to move beyond diaries and OzTAM overcoming hurdles with its VOZ cross-screen service, the digital measurement games are just beginning.