Dish Network has agreed to provide its national and local set-top box data to Nielsen for use in the measurement company’s Total Audience strategy.
The deal comes on the heels of a similar agreement the satellite TV company reached earlier with Nielsen rival ComScore.
According to Dish, data from millions of the satellite TV service provider’s set-tops will be integrated with Nielsen panel data.
“We are aggressively investing and enhancing our local and national TV measurement business by offering clients an innovative suite of solutions that provide higher quality insights and specificity,” Nielsen chief operating officer Steve Hasker said in a statement. “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. As the global leader in audience measurement, this is another step in our efforts to integrate big data into our portfolio and our Total Audience efforts.”
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 enable Nielsen to leverage Dish’s set-top-box 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.
“Nielsen is the industry’s currency and adding aggregated DISH set-top-box viewership data to Nielsen’s products will enhance the granularity and clarity of the insights that Nielsen provides,” said Dish EVP of marketing, programming and media sales Warren Schlichting in a statement “This will allow advertisers and networks to improve their marketing and programming decisions even as television viewing itself becomes more fragmented.”
