Why the NFL (and Everything Else) Keeps Breaking Ratings Records

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0:41The new installment of the eight-time Emmy-winning anthology series features powerhouse performances from Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton, Kaylee Spaney, and legendary Korean actors Yoon Ye-jung and Song Kang-ho. Esquire raves its hands down the best TV show of the year, and IGN hails it a masterpiece. Lee Sung Jin's series remains an untouchable force. Beef for your Emmy Awards consideration. It is Wednesday, December 3rd. If you've been following sports ratings this fall, Craig does pretty much nothing else, it's been a series of very enthusiastic headlines. Amid all the doom and gloom in the TV business, every other day it's been one record-breaking game after another.

1:24The NFL and college football ratings are up double digits for the big games. The World Series averaged more than 34 million viewers across the U.S., Canada, and Japan. That's up 19 % year over year. Then today, we got the most eye-popping news of them all. The Thanksgiving NFL game on CBS between the Chiefs and the Cowboys set a new record for a regular season game, according to Nielsen, with more than 57.2 million viewers. So, what's going on here? A couple things. This is the first TV season for what Nielsen is calling its Big Data Plus panel. That's measurement where they take their annual survey panels of more than 100 ,000 people in the U.S., and then they supplement it with data from 75 million devices like set-top boxes, smart TVs, that kind of stuff.

2:09That, they say, provides a more accurate account of who's actually watching this stuff. They also, as of earlier this year, are measuring 100 % of out-of-home viewing rather than the 65 % that they did last year. That's like bars and restaurants, which were once woefully undercounted. The result has been a pretty consistent uptick for ratings for all live events, pretty much. And not just sports. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade audience hit 34 million people this year. That's up 8 % on NBC and Peacock. But Nielsen says it's not just these new metrics that are leading to the surge. The out-of-home data contributes only a small boost, they say.

2:46and the better big data measurement can sometimes show a decline in viewership for some broadcasts. I've had a lot of questions about this stuff. To me, it seems like the field of play keeps shifting in the consumption data measurement business. And at a time when the TV business overall is in such flux and all these platforms are desperate to show growth. And there are so many complications in measurement these days. Everything from the proliferation of platforms where we watch content, sometimes at the same time, to the streaming services hoarding a lot of this data. Though the big platforms do work with Nielsen to measure the audience on behalf of the advertisers, which overall are the arbiters here.

3:23So we've got Brian Fuhrer back on the show. He's the SVP of product strategy and thought leadership at Nielsen. He's here to field my somewhat aggravated questions. Today, it's the sports ratings boom. How real is it really? From the Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

3:43we are here with brian furer who is a product strategy executive at nielsen and a returning champion guest on the town welcome back brian great to be here thanks for having me back all right so my bs detector went off full blast when i got the press release from cbs about the Thanksgiving ratings and the 57 million people that watched the Cowboys and the Chiefs on Thanksgiving Day, which they say is a record. And I keep looking at these headlines that we've seen all fall, and they're coming from Nielsen data. And it's one record after another World Series records, college football records, NFL records.

4:29And I want to like pull my hair out because the playing ground has fundamentally changed here. You guys are now measuring 100 % of the US in out-of-home ratings, which is up from only two-thirds last year. And you've got this big data panel that you use now that better accounts for audiences than you previously did. So how can all of these outlets be touting these big records when the amount of people that are being measured are totally different. I agree that there's been some changes. And it's, by the way, great lead-in. You're admitting it's BS. Here on the town, Nielsen executive, ratings are BS.

5:14No, tell us the nuanced answer, please. Yeah, as much as we'd love to take credit for these huge numbers, when you really look at what underlies it, the actual data is pretty consistent. The one thing that you said that is accurate is the out-of-home measurement is having a larger contribution than ever before because we have expanded our coverage. Yeah, a third more people. But when we look at the contribution that it's giving, it's not as stunning as you might imagine. So definitely a better contribution. And especially, let's switch back to big data. The objective of big data was to have more reliable, more accurate, not bigger ratings.

5:58In fact, it affects different content and different games differently. And sometimes things are up and sometimes things are down. But the objective is for it to be more reliable and consistent. That's the objective. And I think it's delivering on that. Out of home is giving an advantage. I will admit that because it's expanded. And there's a multiplier effect there. It's not just sports, but when you look at the whole environment of Thanksgiving and people viewing in communal environments and getting together and watching in this way, it probably contributes even more. So how much did it contribute?

6:39Do you know that? How much the out-of-home measurement contributed to the ratings for Thanksgiving Day? Yeah. So for Thanksgiving Day for the Kansas City-Dallas game is about 45%. And that sounds tremendously significant, and it is. Yeah. But when we look back last year, it was in the 38 % range. So it's not like it went from 10 % to 50%. Okay. So you measured a third more people, and it boosted the out-of-home numbers by 7 %? Yeah. I'm using a game. Sure, that's just one game on CBS. but that's the late game or the sort of late window game on Thanksgiving, typically the highest rated game on Thanksgiving.

7:26Sure, sure. And also two marquee teams that don't play each other very often. That's the key point I think we need to make sure we emphasize here is it was lightning in a bottle because all the games were closed on Thanksgiving. So the audiences continued to build. It wasn't like, you know, people just turned off the TV because of boring games. Tremendous games and tremendous coverage. Yeah. Chris Collinsworth can't be bothered to work on Thanksgiving, but that's a whole separate thing for NBC. But you're right. My family was the same way. We started with the early game. It was close. It led into the other one.

8:00And next thing you know, you're watching nine hours of football. Yeah. And I think the closeness, the matchups, everything that was put together this year was just extraordinary. And I think that is really what drove the result more than any kind of methodological changes that we could throw out there. But they helped. And if this was an anomaly, then I would agree with you. But this is happening over and over and over this fall, where we're seeing these headlines of huge raises. I mean, the freaking Thanksgiving Day parade was up 8 % on NBC and Peacock, 34 million people. Is that because they had a wicked performance on the parade?

8:41Is it? I mean, how do you account for that? Well, I'm sure it didn't hurt. But the other thing I really want to point out, and we've been looking closely at this, is if we rewind a few years when they started to simulcast and test different scenarios with putting content out and games out on their streaming platforms, it was just being tested. And what we're seeing now is real legitimate usage and contribution from younger demographics on the streaming platform. It's not just a small number that's icing on the cake anymore. It's a legitimate platform that people are using. All right. I want to talk about that because that is potentially a very big deal because the knock on subscription streaming has always been that it is an on-demand platform and the audience has not transferred over yet for big live events.

9:32And what you seem to be saying is that more and more they are doing that. Do you have numbers to show that? What percentage of the Macy's Parade audience was coming from Peacock? I don't have the exact percentage, but we've been looking at this year over year. And what we have seen is a market shift. And here's what's really important. When we look at the audience, it's building. So it's grown year over year over year. And it's a completely different audience. I should say completely. But it's a much younger audience and, in a lot of cases, much more female audience on the streaming platforms than on broadcast TV.

10:11So they're taking the same content, making it available across different platforms, and consumers are just making a choice. And the streaming platforms are having an increasingly large contribution. So is it because more people are consuming that way, or are you guys just getting better at measuring it? Well, I think both. We've talked about the increases with Atom Home, and we think that was a really important enhancement, and particularly for sports with your different markets that were included. But I do think it's an organic change in how consumers are embracing these platforms. It's not just they're knowing where to go to watch the content now, and maybe they didn't so much before.

10:56That's just speculation. But what I can tell you is the audiences are really responding to the streaming platforms in a way they hadn't before. So if you had to estimate what percentage of the NFL audience is now consuming via these streaming platforms of the linear broadcast partners, not the Amazon game, not the Netflix Christmas Day games, the traditional broadcasters. And now that they all, with Fox adding Fox One, have streaming platforms, what percentage of the audience is consuming that? that? I'm going to give you an ungratifying answer because I don't. I'm always ungratified. Come on.

11:38Really, we have to go back game by game and network by network on that. I'd rather they gave you those numbers because they hold them closely. What I can tell you is that we're definitely seeing consumers embrace and increase year over year. But like 5%, 10 %? I mean, it used to be like two or three percent yeah what's i think important is it's north of that and it's especially impactful when you look at 18 to 34 and younger demos that it's used much less 65 plus than you know the broadcast networks and i think that's good for everybody now you know it's good for the nfl they're exposing you know their their content in the games to much younger audiences in ways that they want to consume it.

12:23Yeah. I mean, the reason I sound skeptical here is I just, I know where the incentives are here. And you guys have just come through a few years of people being pretty openly critical of Nielsen. They thought for years that you guys were not capturing enough of the audience, that you were not capturing the bar audience and the birthday party audience and all this stuff. And you've rectified this with the out of home measurement. And you've been more precise with the big data panel measurement. But the NFL was still not happy. I mean, they said at the beginning of the season, they said, we're happy with the steps we've taken forward for 2025, but there's more work to be done.

13:04What is the NFL talking about when they say there's more work to be done? Shouldn't they be ecstatic with these ratings this year? Well, the great thing about this business is there's always more work to be done. I've been here for four years. Now I'm calling BS on you. What is the NFL talking about? There's always things that we can do. And sports is, in a lot of ways, its own animal. For example, we're working closely with them on some additional initiatives. Don't know that I can talk about them publicly yet. But when you look at the data, for example, sports has, and it was talked about publicly, Sports has a very high co-viewing percentage, probably more than any other content out there.

13:47And they would like us to improve that. And we're working to do that. That's just one example. Okay. So you would be accounting for if Craig has five of his bros over to watch the game, that would be six instead of one viewer. The only thing I push back on is we do that now, but we can always do better at it. How do you do that now? How do you know five people are watching Craig's TV? Two different ways. We have people that wear wearable devices so that if we're going to other people's houses, we're making sure that we know that. And the devices we have in-home allow for guests to log in. So that's the other thing.

14:24And we can have literally two dozen people logged in at a time. And we work hard with our homes to train them to make sure if people are there, hey, press this guest button and tell us what your gender is and what your age is. So that's how we do it. Is that the same for streaming versus linear, that same technology? Like if me and my friends are watching a game on Netflix versus watching on CBS? So, yes. The underpinnings are exactly the same for live streaming sports. Live streaming, we do a little bit more. We pull in big data as well from the first party providers. But the definition or the identification of both the demographics and also the co-viewing is exactly the same.

15:14By the way, if you're interested in knowing more about the Nielsen process and what they do, we actually did a pod on this earlier this year from April. So you can look at that pod. But I want to talk specifically about sports here, because just getting back to this notion that the NFL is unhappy, that these sports brands are dependent on their TV rights and the TV rights are dependent on the numbers that you guys provide. how do you stand up to a league like the NFL that has such awesome power and can roughshod run anyone around any place at any time and go back to them and say, actually, guys, sorry, you're down 5 % in this window.

16:02We do it the same way we do it with all clients, large or small. Is that true? We do. We have to be out. We certainly have to listen and work with all of our clients. And you're doing the things you're doing. You're changing the methodology. It's not just the NFL. It's the NFL content across all of our clients. So it's not just one client. It's the highest profile content that we report on. And we want to get that right and to make it better. So I don't think it's purely an NFL question. And you don't think that it's hard to make comparisons across the years when the methodology changes like this.

16:43Like, I'll make the analogy to covering box office. You see these box office stories that say, oh, this is the biggest opening since 1987. And you look and you're like, well, wait a second. That's not accounting for inflation. You can say that, but it's not accounting for a key metric. And if you are comparing the numbers this year to the numbers even last year or a few years ago, it's just a different playing field. These headlines should have asterisks on them. Yeah, do we basically have to throw out all the info from 2010 to 2022? I think the data stands on its own, and I don't know if it's an asterisk, but I do think it is important to make those distinctions where measurement either expanded for coverage or is more accurate.

17:31I think expansions and coverage are different than accuracy because we always want to be as accurate as possible. But audiences have increased. There's no doubt that the product is being delivered. So why do you think audiences have increased other than people adopting these new platforms more? Is it that the NFL is suddenly more popular? Is college football more popular? Is the Macy's parade just more popular? When you look at the data and you look at the product that's being delivered, I think it's continued. If you watch a game from 20 years ago, 25 years ago, it's a different experience. So the entire environment, I think, has changed.

18:15Yeah, but so has the media fragmentation. There's no monoculture. There's infinite choices. So isn't it just that you're counting better? Well, I think we are counting better. But I do think that sports, particularly NFL, is one thing that defragmentizes the audiences probably more than anything else. You think so? I do. Okay. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I know some of the behavior I witnessed in my own home where my kid does not watch live sports. He watches highlights on YouTube. But we don't use personal anecdotes here. You are saying that the monoculture is not only maintained for sports, but it has actually increased as all of these choices and platforms have proliferated.

19:01I don't want to discount the use case you cited. And that is really important. And that's one of the areas we're looking to expand measurement on is all of those clips and what's happening in, for example, the creator environment. That's all having impact. But I will say the content that really does best against and brings a lot of younger viewers back in is sports. It's much more universal, I think, than a lot of other content. And putting it on streaming in ways that younger demos want to consume it helps as well.

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20:52What's to keep Amazon from just completely lying to you? Other than that they're a publicly traded company and, you know, if they make a boast about ratings, maybe someone could sue them. But you know what I mean. It used to be that you were, there were checks on the linear audience. Now these are enclosed platforms like Netflix and Amazon that are reporting to you who is watching. And are better at counting data than anybody. Yeah, but Nielsen is the brand, Craig. I mean, the reason why they use Nielsen is because advertisers want an outside third party to tell them what the audiences are. If it was just coming from the first party data, yeah, they can do that.

21:34They do sell that way. But Nielsen being involved helps. But is Amazon just telling Nielsen directly what the ratings are? Or is it like the IRS and your taxes where it's like, we know what you owe us, but you have to guess first? Well, let me answer the question because it's really important. And it's the same concept that we're doing with Big Data Plus Panel, ingesting content from the cable companies and the set-top box data and integrating that. The only reason that they're coming to us is the consistency that the advertisers accept by us taking our panel and we're starting with the panel and we're making the data better with their first-party data.

22:17It's not that they're shipping across this data and we're just ingesting it and reporting it out. We're using our panel in conjunction with the first-party data to make both better. And that's really our objective. So if yours didn't match theirs, you would call them on it? We use ours to adjust theirs. And also we use theirs to also fill in gaps that might exist. And what might those gaps be? I'll give you an example, though. It's really important to understand. What we know with our meters is there's one big thing that people don't realize. We know when the set is either turned off or the channel is changed.

22:54And a lot of the data that's being streamed out doesn't have that intelligence. That's one of the things that probably one of the most important things that we do with our panel is we adjust when people are not watching. So that's a big thing that we do to improve that data. And the first party platforms can't do that? Netflix doesn't know when I'm not watching Netflix? They know what's streamed out. But if you turn off your TV and your device that is still on, there's a lot of cases that get missed. Not 100 % of the time, but that's a very important adjustment factor that we have to put in. Okay.

23:31And you guys are fending off other competitors that have their own methodology, the video amps, the Luminates, all of these other systems that claim to have different and they say better formulas. When it comes to sports in particular, how do you guys pitch yourselves as being the most accurate? sports is by far the most complicated thing that we measure yeah because there's no start and end time exactly so first off decades and decades of measuring it and having the institutional knowledge of how to put that together is really important here and we and knowing how to work with our clients to get that all of that those underlying components right is super important and having as you know our meters work on codes they listen for codes to know exactly what feed is being put out there.

24:22Our clients put audio codes into every one of those feeds of every one of those games. And that's how we know who's watching what. It's very complicated and we really relish the responsibility to do that with our clients. And we know that the data we have is the most accurate. My biggest question in all of this, Brian, is the difference between a viewer and a view. And if those things are getting conflated now, back in the day, a four-person household had one television. so that counted as four people watching one game. If you keep that formula today, when a house has three televisions, does that mean 12 people are watching a game or is it still just four?

24:59It's always just four because what we know is who is watching on what sets. So if you can have 20 televisions and five people, then you go from one of the, they log in, log out. We know who's watching in each site. So what happens if I'm at home watching a game with my family of four and I turn the game off and go outside or I keep the game on, I go outside to walk my dog and I then pull up the game on my phone. Does that count as more another person viewing the game or am I still the same person on my phone versus watching at home on my couch? Well, there's a lot of different scenarios. I want to be sure.

25:39We work with a lot of different clients in a lot of different scenarios. If that particular app is measured and we work with a lot of clients to implement Nielsen metering directly into the apps, then yeah, that would credit in. And that certainly is one of the examples that we have. There are certain scenarios where it wouldn't, but with sports being the highest profile content, our clients are very anxious to work with us to make sure that that gets measured. And in most cases, it would continue to be measured. I was just curious how much double counting is going on if I'm switching from my TV to my laptop to my phone.

26:14Yeah, what if you're watching two games? One on your phone, one on your TV. In that case, we do have a winning situation. If you're logged into your TV, that would credit it. But would it credit you also watching on your phone? Not in that case, because we know who the person is, and we tie it back to the person. Hmm. Wow. Very complicated. There's a lot that goes on in the background with our panel. And that is absolutely the backbone. Which sport is growing the fastest? You know, I think the whole MMA area is the area that's growing very quickly. So you think the Ellisons were smart to pay$7.7 billion to bring UFC to CBS and Paramount Plus?

26:59Can't comment on that one. Not commenting is enough. Is baseball up, down? Where are we on baseball? We've had a really, and we've been looking at the World Series. was really pretty extraordinary how it really tracked. Baseball is a different sport than football because it's so local up until the playoffs. So it is different. But all the metrics, according to you guys, were up on the national games this year. Sunday Night Baseball was up. The Fox games were up. The World Series was certainly up. I mean, obviously a game seven going into extra innings probably helps that a lot. And then if you look, I know you guys don't measure it, But if you look at the baseball ratings in Canada and Japan, they put out a number of like 50 million people watch the World Series.