The almighty Nielsen ratings that make or break new television programs every fall will soon be coming to a new medium: video games. The Nielsen Company and Sony Computer Entertainment America announced Monday that they would be partnering to measure the potency of games as a way to deliver advertising.
Under the new arrangement, Sony will provide Nielsen with data from its Playstation network, which Nielsen will use to create a new measurements for the reach, frequency and effectiveness of game advertising. Nielsen will combine the new data with the existing game data it collects alongside television viewing, to produce a more detailed profile of game players and calculate the cost-per-view for advertisers.
“SCEA’s contribution of its game census data, combined with Nielsen’s data sets, represents a milestone in our efforts to bring greater legitimacy and accuracy to game advertising measurement,” said Jeff Herrmann, vice president of Nielsen Games, in a statement. “By marrying SCEA’s server-side data traffic with our standard ratings metrics, we will be able to provide advertisers with a much more robust picture of the impact of their game network advertising and of those consumers who are actually playing games, all while preserving consumer privacy.”
The initial press release for the deal did not mention how Sony was being compensated for the data, or whether consumers will be able to opt out of being monitored. Nielsen hopes to have its improved GamePlay Metrics reports available starting in July.
