Nielsen is about to give advertisers something they’ve been asking for at least 15 years—ratings of individual commercials in linear TV. But at this point, it’s mostly a stop on the journey toward a new cross-platform Nielsen One measurement, which aims to provide a single ratings system across linear, connected TV and other digital video advertising.

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The company on Monday announced that it will add Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics, launching in the first half of next year. To facilitate the technology, Nielsen is expanding its relationship with ad tech firm Extreme Reach to allow for encoding “the vast majority” of all linear TV commercials with Nielsen’s watermarks to facilitate the measurement, according to a Nielsen statement.

The current C3 measurement widely used today as a currency for TV deals is based on average ratings for all commercials in a program, rather than individual spots.

Extreme Reach is “the source of creative assets for the majority of brands,” including more than 90 of Ad Age’s 100 Leading National Advertisers, said Guarav Agarwal, chief operating officer at the company, in a statement.

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As part of delivering individual commercial metrics, Nielsen also will use its Gracenote Content Signatures to identify and credit individual ads where no watermark is present. Nielsen-owned Gracenote is one of two companies—along with Inscape—that license automated content recognition (ACR) technology to log commercials shown on smart TVs, a technology also used by many Nielsen competitors such as VideoAmp, Comscore and iSpot.tv.

“Any step in this direction is welcome,” said Barry Lowenthal, CEO of Stagwell's Media Kitchen, of Nielsen adding commercial ratings. “It’s progress. People have been wanting this for a long time.”

Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics, like Nielsen’s national and local TV ratings, aren’t accredited by the Media Rating Council. The company is currently making improvements to its household measurement panel to regain the industry stamp of approval that was suspended in September. Problems maintaining panel households amid the pandemic, uncovered earlier this year under scrutiny by the Video Advertising Bureau media company trade group, led to undercounting of TV ratings and suspension of MRC accreditation.

Even so, Nielsen TV ratings remain the currency for the vast majority of TV deals—accreditation or no.

But the addition of individual commercial ratings isn't meant so much to improve current Nielsen ratings as it is to make linear TV ad measurement comparable to CTV and other digital measurement as Nielsen prepares its next-generation Nielsen One, which it expects to begin operating early next year and have fully operational by the end of the year.

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“Giving the industry true, trusted metrics that offer harmonization across platforms is the bedrock to revolutionizing the cross-media buying and selling process and a foundational step toward Nielsen One,” said Kim GIlberti, senior VP of product measurement for Nielsen.