The changes to Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics will help the company move towards developing audience estimates based on individual advertisements rather than commercial minutes.

While the industry currently transacts on Nielsen’s ‘C3’ metric, based on the average of all commercial minutes in a programme, the new Individual Commercial Metrics reporting capability will enable the measurement of linear television at a “subminute” level and audience estimates at a level of granularity that is more comparable to digital, Nielsen said.

Nielsen said it hoped the changes to Nielsen Individual Commercial Metrics would pave the way for better comparability across digital and linear platforms.

The company has been developing Nielsen One, which is due to launch later next year, to unify Nielsen’s audience measurement products, as part of a plan to fully transition the industry to cross-media metrics by autumn 2024.

In early 2022, Nielsen said it would enhance its process for collecting and crediting watermarks, enabling the detection of watermarks more frequently within a given minute, which the company claimed would better cover shorter duration events, such as individual ads.

Nielsen’s television measurement will also use Gracenote Content Signatures, which will allow for crediting for instances where there is no watermark present.

This will impact on several of Nielsen’s metering technologies, including its Portable People Meter wearable devices.

The changes follow a tricky period for the company, with the Media Rating Council (MRC) voting earlier this year to suspend Nielsen’s industry accreditation for its national TV ratings service, following Nielsen’s request for a hiatus from the accreditation process for its national TV ratings.

The MRC also removed the accreditation hiatus that had been in place for Nielsen’s local TV ratings services, and suspended accreditation for these markets.

Kim Gilberti, senior vice-president product management at Nielsen, said: “Giving the industry true, trusted metrics that offer harmonisation across platforms is the bedrock to revolutionising the cross-media buying and selling process and a foundational step toward Nielsen One.

“By transforming our TV measurement and moving to Individual Commercial Metrics, both media buyers and sellers will be able to maximise the value of their inventory as well as capitalise and drive return on investment of their advertising spend.”