M+E Connections

Nielsen Upbeat on Growth Opportunities for Gracenote

Nielsen is “focused on three key growth opportunities” for its Gracenote Content Services, David Kenny, Nielsen CEO and chief diversity officer, said Feb. 25 during the company’s earnings call for the fourth quarter (ended Dec. 31).

The first Gracenote growth opportunity is in metadata. “More audiences, content, markets and platforms means that there are more opportunities for our core Gracenote metadata services,” Kenny told analysts.

“We’re growing our substantial base by adding new platforms, markets and content and increasing the capacity and speed of our ability to grow metadata,” he explained, adding: “We have been building our global leadership position with key industry players, such as Comcast, Samsung, Google and Liberty Global.”

The second growth opportunity is in “new solutions for new products across discovery, marketing and insights” that the company is developing, he said. As an example, Nielsen recently launched Gracenote Inclusion Analytics to “accelerate diversity in content and enable clients to create more… programming backed by our data-driven analytics,” he noted.

Third, Nielsen has a “bold ambition for Gracenote,” he said, telling analysts: “Gracenote can help studios leverage the Gracenote Content ID to attach a unique identifier to their content, which will serve to simplify and scale the distribution and discovery of content across the full range of channels and streaming services used by audiences today.”

Gracenote has long been providing detailed information on movies and TV shows that are seen on cable program guides or discovered on streaming services. Gracenote also provides real-time sports score statistics for several of the world’s top leagues, events, teams and players to use in their audience experience, Kenny noted.

Gracenote has also now been “deployed in over 120 million cars worldwide, providing data through car entertainment systems,” he pointed out. Gracenote’s information on artists and songs, meanwhile, power music services and consumer electronics brands, he added, calling Gracenote metadata the “de facto standard across the entertainment industry.” Nearly “every consumer interacts with Gracenote metadata multiple times in any given day,” he said.

Q4 Results

Nielsen net income for the fourth quarter was $35 million (10 cents a share), reversing the $109 million loss (31 cents a share) reported in Q4 2019.

Audience Measurement revenue in the company’s Nielsen Global Media division that also includes Gracenote increased 0.2% in Q4, “reflecting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sports and non-contracted revenue, and ongoing pressure in local television,” the company said in its earnings news release.

In Audience Measurement, the company is expanding its “connected TV footprint as we said we would, with the addition of YouTube, YouTube TV and Vizio, and we’ll work to further this,” Kenny told analysts.

The company also recently expanded coverage of streaming to include the viewing of movie releases that are directly available to consumers via streaming or multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) platforms, he noted. As an example, “for the first time, we released viewership data” for WarnerMedia’s HBO Max streaming platform for the movie Wonder Woman 1984, he said.