Univision uses Comscore to measure some local markets as TV industry seeks Nielsen replacements

Univision selected Comscore as its sole linear TV viewership measurement service for three U.S. markets, partnering with the company as networks across the country broaden their audience currency horizons beyond long-time powerhouse Nielsen. The agreement will see the Nielsen rival measure the Spanish-language media giant’s TV audiences in a trio of newly acquired markets—Orlando and Tampa, Florida, and Washington, D.C.—while simultaneously working to refine Comscore’s own Hispanic viewership measurement capabilities. Last month, Univision announced the takeover of a local TV station in each of the three American cities from Entravision Communications, which will operate the stations under a licensing agreement with Univision until Dec. 31. “We are now, like many other media companies, looking at every option to measure our audiences,” said Roberto Ruiz, Univision’s executive VP of research, insights and analytics. While most of its other linear measurement needs are currently handled by Nielsen, it seized its acquisition of three new stations as a chance to “just start fresh” with a new audience currency. The media company already has a relationship with Comscore for many of its digital measurement needs. “I think both of us are looking at this as the beginning of a bigger relationship, definitely,” Ruiz said of Univision and Comscore. There is still “room for improvement in Hispanic measurement,” Ruiz said. And while Ruiz acknowledges that Comscore doesn’t provide a “perfect offering,” he believes the two companies can forge a mutually beneficial relationship rooted in household device data, which measures audiences differently than Nielsen’s panel measurement. “There’s no recruitment effort, there’s no knocking on doors,” Carol Hinnant, Comscore’s chief revenue officer, said of the company’s measurement data collection, which is sourced directly from multichannel video programming distributors, or MVPDs, rather than collective audience panels. “It’s no secret that Nielsen has significant challenges during the COVID era,” said Ruiz, suggesting that the company’s panels have suffered not just in size but also in terms of representation of viewers of color. With the number of multicultural panelists dwindling in some local markets, “the behavior of one or two or three homes in a [Nielsen] panel has a significant influence on ratings,” he said. Univision’s three-market deal with Comscore is just the latest in a series of steps taken in the fast-evolving world of linear TV measurement. Many major U.S. networks this year have announced their intentions to look beyond ratings titan Nielsen, whose dominant status in the industry has been called into question after a series of recent measurement missteps, and at least experiment with other audience currency providers. Nielsen’s Media Rating Council accreditation has been suspended since the beginning of September, although other prominent U.S. measurement services hoping to fill Nielsen’s void, including Comscore, never held MRC accreditation in the first place. NBCUniversal has been among the most vocal network proponents of searching for new measurement solutions, announcing a major request for proposals earlier this year that has attracted significant interest from audience measurement firms large and small. The VAB, a top TV industry trade group, also announced the creation of its Measurement Innovation Task Force in September, bringing together leaders of current initiatives including consortium OpenAP and NBCU’s Measurement Innovation Forum to create a standardized approach to ratings measurement. Univision’s selection of Comscore as a new local measurement partner “is like an acknowledgment that it’s OK to move away from the legacy currency and try something new,” said Hinnant, heralding it as a “groundbreaking move.” Comscore has been providing audience data to stations owned by NBCUniversal’s Telemundo, another key player in the U.S. Hispanic media space, since 2019.

Univision uses Comscore to measure some local markets as TV industry seeks Nielsen replacements

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