Nielsen Media Research

Television Audience Measurement System

Customer

Nielsen Media Research (NMR), the famous TV-ratings company, is the leading provider of television information services in Canada and the U.S. Clients include television networks and affiliates, independent stations, syndicators, cable networks, cable systems, advertisers, and their agencies. The company has headquarters in New York City, and offices in major markets across Canada and the United States.

Mission

Nielsen Media Research, in Canada, is a leading provider of television audience measurement (TAM). Advertisers, Agencies and Broadcasters benefit greatly from the national and local TV ratings services that Nielsen provides – the industry gold standard for measuring the value of commercial airtime.

In addition, the company gives the media industry access to new insights into competitive advertising activity and offers a robust range of superior advertising information services. The Advertising Information division (AIS) of Nielsen Media Research provides advertising expenditure tracking and campaign GRP tracking that helps you identify your competitors’ media strategy. As well, a range of broadcast and print creative services are available for the benefit of the advertising industry.

Challenge

NMR’s TAM system was a collection of applications written and enhanced over the past 20 years. The combination of customer demands, competitive pressures and a changing industry pushed NMR to address the underlying technology that supported the TAM system. The conclusion was to completely re-invent the manner in which the organization analyzed and communicated its results. A 10 month timeline was put in place to review the inner workings of the TAM system and to recreate them using the .Net 2.0 Framework and SQL Server 2005.

Approach

Agora worked with NMR to redefine its data model and to rebuild the database in SQL Server 2005. Simultaneously we worked together to re-invent the user experience and how NMR’s clients will access the data. As part of the engagement with NMR, we helped to train and develop a .Net development team, transitioning the team from the support of the legacy application.

Solution

The new TAM system (named Borealis), which has launched, is a smart client application. Users interact over the web with centrally managed databases. The new application has eliminated the need to send data via download or CD and has sped up searches and analysis by 100 times over the previous application. This solution is built using .Net 2.0 and SQL Server 2005.

Impact

This project has enabled NMR to protect its flagship offering in a competitive landscape and has eliminated a number of key customer issues, while increasing the speed with which customers receive the analysis they need.