Today Nexstar announced a plan to build a next-generation audience measurement platform. According to Nexstar’s press release, this new platform will be capable of providing data that accurately reflects the “scale and power of the company’s national and local media businesses.” This comes as Nexstar made it clear they don’t think current measurements properly represent their business.
To do this, Nexstar is putting out a request for partners to join them in building this.
“Nexstar has an unprecedented collection of media assets, including the largest local broadcast group in the United States, a national cable news network, a free over-the-air television network, and a variety of digital media properties, and we need deeper, richer data about the audiences interacting with them,” said Michael Strober, Nexstar’s Chief Revenue Officer. “We believe current methods of audience measurement inadequately reflect our national reach and the effectiveness of the local activation we deliver to advertisers and marketers. We need to accelerate the pace of innovation in cross-platform measurement not just with national content, but with the content generated in every one of our local markets. We also must ensure that the best data is operational across the company.”
Nexstar says it has also been actively engaging with new measurement partners, working earlier this year with VideoAmp and iSpot to deliver linear and streaming audience data generated across its media platforms. This comes as Nexstar and others struggle to properly understand their reach in a day and age of OTA TV, streaming, and traditional pay-TV services.
“Our work with several new measurement partners has demonstrated the benefit of fresh thinking and the need for a much more expansive set of measurement capabilities across our entire footprint,” said Ms. Gryncwajg. “We are looking for innovations and roadmaps that can deliver game-changing improvements to help us maximize the effectiveness of Nexstar’s portfolio for advertisers across the whole funnel – from awareness to conversion and purchase. We need to measure what matters most, and we need to do that across all of our endpoints with speed and precision.”
Nexstar recently has been pushing hard to drive up what it gets for its locals on two fronts. First, Nexstar is in the middle of a fight with DIRECTV, which has seen its locals go dark for millions.
The next big fight Nexstar is in the middle of is asking the FCC to reclassify streaming services like Fubo and Hulu as cable companies. This would let Nexstar negotiate directly with them to get more money.
The question now is will this new measurement system change any minds when it comes time to negotiate with providers?