Nielsen announced a multi-year agreement today to integrate Dish’s aggregated set-top box data into Nielsen’s national and local TV ratings service. This news comes just a few days after competitor comScore revealed a deal with Dish to renew its integration of the operator’s TV viewing information with comScore’s TV measurement service.
“Dish’s set-top-box data is the first nationwide dataset to be integrated with our panel data, reaching the perfect balance of deep viewing characteristics and the granularity of large datasets,” Steve Hasker, COO at Nielsen reports.
Initially, the data provided by Dish will be integrated into Nielsen’s local TV measurement service across all 210 designated market areas. The agreement will also reportedly enable Nielsen to leverage Dish’s STB data to complement many of its local and national products including Nielsen Scarborough, Nielsen Data Fusion, Nielsen Media Custom Insights, and multiple national insight services.
Additionally, Nielsen will also have the ability to use set-top-box data for its suite of marketing effectiveness and return on ad sales solutions, including CPG, retail and auto.
Warren Schlichting, Dish EVP of marketing, programming and media sales calls Nielsen “the industry’s currency” and says that adding aggregated Dish set-top viewership data to will enhance the granularity and clarity of the insights that Nielsen provides.
“This will allow advertisers and networks to improve their marketing and programming decisions even as TV viewing itself becomes more fragmented,” Dish’s Schlichting adds.