Nexstar Media Group, the largest broadcast-station owner, said that it will immediately transition its advertising sales business from being based on ratings to impressions.
Many station group owners, including NBCUniversal, Heasts, Gray and Berkshire Hathaway have moved to impressions.
Nexstar said the switch provides advertisers with more qualitative data about the audience, and more accurately reflects the total number of people watching a program or commercials.
The company said it has been working with Comscore to develop a viewer measurement metric that provides advertisers with verified, aggregated, unduplicated viewer total across Nexstar’s broadcast, digital, mobile and streaming video platforms.
“This strategic move represents the next step in the natural evolution of audience measurement,” said Tim Busch, president, Nexstar Broadcasting.
“We have been analyzing this transition for the last year, educating and training our sales teams and preparing to go to market with a CPM-based ad sales model. Our sales force will be able to talk to all advertisers—big or small, national or local—in an informed, fact-based manner about maximizing the reach and effectiveness of their spending across every available media channel and every viewer will be counted, no matter where or when they watch,” Busch said. “In addition, advertisers will be able to universally target their customers regardless of the distribution platform and monitor the results through unduplicated audience measurement.”
Nexstar began working with Comscore on a new metric for unduplicated audiences across video platforms in 2018.
“This transition is an important step in modernizing the way buyers and sellers conduct business to better reflect the trends in video-consumption and to ensure that all viewing audiences are being accurately counted,” said Steve Walsh, executive VP, Local Services at Comscore.
