Nielsen December Outage Catches MRC’s Attention

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And as a result of Nielsen’s November connectivity problem that impacted December ratings, the Media Ratings Council says it is withholding its accreditation for the affected markets.

MRC CEO George Ivie posted a statement on the MRC website about the Nielsen snafu: “Accreditation of the December 2016 PPM service reports will be withheld until such time that Nielsen Audio has fully addressed MRC’s inquiries and has completed additional analyses requested by MRC that demonstrate to MRC’s satisfaction that the PPM service disruption that affected, at minimum, the first week of the December reporting period, has been addressed and appropriately disclosed in a manner that is fully consistent with the MRC Minimum Standards for Media Ratings Research.”

Nielsen says this problem happened between November 3 and November 9 and blamed the PPM disconnect on the company moving to a new audio data collection site. Eight percent of the installed PPMs across the 48 PPM markets lost connectivity and became inactive, and it impacted the December PPM monthly survey. Nielsen disagreed with the MRC’s decision to withhold accreditation. “Following the PPM connectivity issue during week one of the December survey, Nielsen’s Data Science team conducted a rigorous analysis of data quality and we firmly stand behind the December PPM monthly estimates. The sample performance for the December report is in line with the standards that have been used in prior months for the 26 accredited markets. While we disagree with the MRC’s decision to withhold accreditation of the December PPM monthly data, Nielsen remains committed to the MRC accreditation process.

Ivie says while Nielsen has shared some information about the outage, it’s not enough. “MRC believes the data analysis related to this incident with which we have been presented by Nielsen Audio, in addition to Nielsen Audio’s responses to a series of questions related to the incident that MRC has raised to Nielsen Audio, are incomplete, and therefore MRC and its Radio Committee and Board of Directors are unable to conclude as yet on this matter.”

The Ivie statement says the marketplace will be updated at a future time if the situation changes and the issues have been addressed.

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