ESPN and The Nielsen Company announce a collaboration to measure how consumers use media across a variety of platforms including television, the Internet and digital mobile devices. ESPN will work with Nielsen to develop a new model for cross-media measurement. This will enable buyers and sellers of television advertising to understand more completely the interaction of new digital platforms with traditional television viewing.

The ESPN-Nielsen initiative will have three main parts:

• It will feature the first deployment of Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel, the new integrated sample of households being assembled by Nielsen to measure TV and Internet use within the same home.
• The initiative will also link together research data from Nielsen Mobile and other measurement sources to evaluate the cross-media usage.
• Nielsen will also provide the opportunity for several ESPN advertisers to link in and study insights about their advertising on ESPN platforms.

Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel will provide the first real insight into how people experience television and Internet, including streaming media, in their daily lives. Panelists will have their television viewing measured by Nielsen’s People Meters and their Internet usage measured by Nielsen//NetRatings’ Internet metering technology. The sample will be assembled from a combination of sources, including newly recruited homes and existing TV panelists who are leaving the National People Meter television sample. For ESPN, the panel will measure, among other things:

• The impact of TV promotions on driving people to the Internet and of Internet promotions driving users to watch ESPN programs.
• The number of hours of TV and Internet usage per week, in total, and by time of day for any specific demographic or viewer type.
• Simultaneous media usage across various combinations, such as viewing TV and streaming.

Also as part of the initiative, Nielsen will link its television and Internet measurement to the ESPN Sports Poll, a syndicated tracking survey of U.S. adults and teenagers that monitors general fan profiles, viewing habits, event attendance and sports industry trends. This data “fusion” will allow ESPN to analyze TV viewing and Internet usage against specific variables from Sports Poll or a combination of variables, such as ESPN’s ratings by program among NFL fans who visit NFL.com.

To measure the impact of ESPN content on mobile devices such as cell phones, Nielsen will also fuse its existing TV/Internet fusion product with data from its Telephia service, which measures mobile web and mobile video usage.

Once the fusion is complete, ESPN will be able to conduct a number of analyses, including:

• Measuring the unduplicated reach of ESPN’s traditional television programming, ESPN.com and ESPN mobile video.
• Measuring the overlap across the platforms (i.e. what percent of ESPN users use all three platforms or what percent are both TV and mobile, etc.)
• Being able to illustrate the demographic and market break composition of various combinations of audiences