Susan Whiting: Nielsen Company EVP/Chairman of Nielsen Media Research

Susan Whiting

Susan Whiting joined Nielsen in 1978, moved her way up the ladder and was named general manager of National Services and Emerging Markets in 1997 and became responsible for the sales and marketing of national services for broadcast and cable networks, advertising agencies, syndicators and local cable system customers.  She also managed Nielsen Media Research’s Emerging Markets group, which included a broad range of services for advertisers, the company’s competitive advertising intelligence service Monitor-Plus for all customers, and other related products in development. 

Susan was named president and COO in 2001 and CEO on January 1, 2002.  She was appointed President and CEO of the Media Measurement and Information Group of VNU (now called The Nielsen Company) on April 4, 2005 with overall responsibility for the Group’s business units, including Nielsen Media Research (U.S. and International), Media Solutions, and Nielsen Entertainment.  On January 1, 2007, she was appointed EVP of VNU with responsibility for all global marketing and product leadership efforts across the business. At that time, also named Chairman of Nielsen Media Research. She led the re-branding of VNU as The Nielsen Company effective January 2007.

Susan also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Wilmington Trust Corporation, the Ad Council, and the YMCA of Greater New York. Here, Susan gives us details on the company’s restructuring efforts and addresses the latest issues and rollout plan for the AP Meter.


Tell us how the restructuring has gone at Nielsen since our last interview in June of 2007.  Were you immediate goals achieved in the timeframe you had desired?

We’ve achieved a great deal during the past year. 

We began by making sure our clients had the right research tools to follow their content and advertising across multiple screens. Moreover, since the last time we spoke, we’ve acquired several different businesses, so that we can now measure the online impact of advertising through NetRatings; track consumer-generated media and buzz through BuzzMetrics; monitor the mobile marketplace with Telephia; and, more recently, measure engagement in advertising with the addition of IAG. As a result, we have all the pieces in place to measure content and advertising as they move across the three screens. 

At the same time, we’ve focused internally to connect what people see, hear and watch with what they purchase. A lot of our thinking has been around how to build better applications and tools for clients who want to be able to connect advertising to purchase behavior, at least around consumer goods. 

So a lot has happened over the past year as we’ve made progress on all of these fronts, measuring the broad landscape and then trying to connect the value of the advertising to the actual product purchase. 

What are your current missions at Nielsen?  What are you tackling right now?

First of all, we’re taking everything we’ve accomplished in the last year or two and trying to make sure the products we’re delivering to clients effectively address their needs. With some of the acquisitions, we want to be certain our media clients and our consumer clients understand the information that’s available. In other words, we want to put the information in a context that makes a real difference to their businesses and answers their toughest questions; and then deliver it in ways they can best use it. 

Some of that has involved testing new ideas, enhancing product development and investing in the infrastructure to deliver the most useful information. For example, we’re building   a convergence panel to examine the combination of TV usage and online behavior in the same home. That is the top priority, because for our advertiser, media and consumer clients, the most important question we can help them answer is - how does TV and the Internet interact, and how should they be allocating their messages across the two? 

The second priority is to deliver all the information clients need about commercial viewing and time-shifting in television.  As you know, we’ve already delivered quite a bit of information around these two key issues. 

Thirdly, we are rolling out the full electronic platform as well as our A2M2 strategy.  I think one of the more interesting examples of all this is the work we just finished around the Beijing Olympics.  We worked with the Beijing Organizing Committee to put together information about consumer attitudes toward China before the Games, and then measured the viewing of the Games themselves.

We estimate that a third of the world watched the Opening Ceremony. We arrived at that by pulling together the various information we collected and then working with many other partners [some of whom we aren’t even necessarily financially involved with] to produce the results. It was a unique combination of consumer behavior, TV measurement, online measurement, mobile measurement and buzz surrounding the athletes. It also was an ideal example of what we’re trying to do as a company, which is to provide a global view of the insights we pick up across different screens and relate it to consumer behavior.

We are impressed with the sheer volume of information that you’re gathering at a lot of these different levels. It makes for good reading in our publications.

That’s been an additional focus.  What we’re trying to do is go beyond the very important job of delivering information, like television ratings data or sales data on consumer package goods, and starting to also provide deeper insights into larger issues. We use the Olympics as one example, but there are many others, and you’ll see more and more of it coming from the Nielsen Company, whether it’s about consumer confidence, gasoline prices or the election.  In fact, we’re doing a lot of work around the election right now, such as tracking the spending by candidates and how they’re reaching out to their audiences using different venues to deliver different messages.

You also had a number of valuable insights on the Beijing Olympics. The website NBCOlympics.com--the merchandising was just unbelievable.

You really saw it, and you saw it broadly around the world.  Broadcasters, newspapers, radio companies from all over built their web presence because it gave them the opportunity to readily make the most current information available.  I thought it was fascinating, and now all kinds of people are interested in the athletes, the competition and everything else surrounding the event. It was a terrific example of how many companies and advertisers are taking new  approaches to doing business.

We did a story recently about the AP Meter issues discussed at a recent MRC meeting.  You’re looking to continue with the current AP 2.0 Meter. Is there another choice out there that you’re considering and why?

We are absolutely continuing with our AP Meter. Anytime Nielsen invests in a metering platform (and we spent more than 10 years developing the AP Meter before we decided to launch it), it’s an ongoing process. It’s not AP 2.0 forever. It’s AP 2.0 to start. Already there have been enhancements and we will continue to invest in the technology.  We build it as a platform and then we build different applications on top of that.
I think it would be inaccurate to say it’s the same meter going forward. It’s the same platform going forward, and we continually modify it, depending on what the meter needs to do. 

That was the same thing with the prior platform, which was not the same meter for 25 years. It was the same platform and we built different applications on it.

The Mark II?

Yes. The idea was to build a metering platform that would allow us to measure digital television. That’s why we can measure time-shifting and Video On Demand,  because we have this new platform we initiated many years ago; and in which have made the necessary investments and have continued to enhance. 

There have been and always will be some anomalies when you compare an old system to a new system. The new metering system requires encoding of the different signals, and part of the reason we did that was to allow us to track content across multiple platforms. It also has a backup system--a signaturing system--so that if someone doesn’t encode, there is still a back up.  That is a big differentiation in our meter strategy. 

However, we’re continuing to invest in ways to improve it, so that as we find things we didn’t see before in testing, we fix them. 

What’s more, we’ve worked very closely with the MRC and a number of clients in markets as we rolled this out. That is our approach for the metering platform going forward, and it’s a constant enhancement process.

MRC Chairman George Ivie voiced very strong support for the AP Meter and said there are absolutely no dangers of it losing accreditation.  Can you tell us a little bit why the AP Meter is so crucial to the commerce of advertising and broadcasting? 

It is very basic. We’ve always captured the activity in a home that occurs with regard to television, and we recognized the importance of building  a platform that would enable us to do the same for digital television as it evolved. The AP Meter allows us to measure everything in the home from straightforward digital TV to time-shifting to Video On Demand. Just as important, those same codes are being looked at in different ways for online measurement, so if a program is encoded on TV it can also be picked up on a PC. 

It’s critical to ensure that we capture all the viewing, and as television becomes all digital this is the metering platform that does that. 

The off-shoring of jobs continues to be a concern to some Nielsen clients and it has drawn some national attention. Lou Dobbs had covered it because of some of the domestic jobs lost in the Tampa area.  Certainly Nielsen isn’t alone in of shoring jobs by any means, but from a bottom line standpoint why did Nielsen need to do it?

Stepping back and looking across our entire company, and considering all the requirements we were just talking about, it’s clear we have to be very efficient. To do that most effectively, we’ve found places where partners can help us do it better than we can by ourselves. 

What gets lost in some of the articles and stories is the fact that Nielsen needs some partners who have the capacity and capabilities we don’t have on our own. So we found some great partners who can supplement our capabilities in everything from computing capacity to skills pertaining to certain data structures that are the underpinning of what a lot of our data sits on. 

Every day, I sit with clients from around the world and across all spectrums who tell me, “Look we’re under significant cost pressure. You guys have to manage your business as well as you can and we’re asking you to do more.”

To do that successfully while we also keep innovating and carrying out a host of other initiatives, from rolling out AP Meters to measuring online and mobile for our clients, we have to be increasingly more efficient.  And that has led us to finding some different partners who can do certain things for us better than we can. That let’s us focus on the kinds of work where our industry experience and quality focus really make a difference.

Well thanks for your honesty on that.  We had heard from one or two clients that there was a little concern that Nielsen may have grown to rapidly and broadly, quality control was at issue. Do you think there was any sort of quality control loss after some of this staff was cut or is it just a learning curve that people will adjust to both internally and externally?

I’ve heard that question before. Mitchell Habib, who heads our global operations group, has sat down with a number of our folks to look at this, and we now have more metrics on everything we do than ever before.  There is no direct connection between some of the moves we’ve made around the world – as have many of our clients – and quality issues. 

We always try to do the best we can, and our processes are very transparent.  Everybody knows, as you do, if we have a bump. But we address it immediately. For example, there was a particular set of issues last Fall and into the Spring around the delivery of commercial data and the timing. We addressed it right away. We brought in a lot of extra capabilities to deal with it that we couldn’t have brought in before, and we fixed it. 

But I don’t think our ability to grow and issues related to quality are directly connected. If anything, some of the moves we’ve made actually give us a lot more capacity right now than we had before, and I think that’s something our clients really need.

What is the latest on the LPM Market roll out schedule? 

Right now there are 16 markets that use our Local People Meters as the day to day buying and selling currency.  Miami and Denver are in what we call preliminary period so they are in transition from the Meter Diary System to the Local People Meters.  Orlando, Sacramento and St. Louis will have a preliminary period by the end of this year and then there are more next year. We’re on schedule right now – through October 2009 -  for the remainder what we call the top 25 markets. 

How did the Wilmington test perform as it relates to the meters in a digital environment?  Obviously Wilmington is a diary market but we understand meters are there.
 
We established a super site there (which was a test of encoding in a market for two TV stations that volunteered to do this, even though we don’t measure Wilmington with meters) and we’ve been regularly monitoring it.  I think we’ll know in the [next couple days and the next couple weeks] how it has performed.  As far as we can see so far, it seems like everything turned out okay from the Nielsen perspective.

What has the reception been thus far to our out of home audience data collected from cell phone panelists via the IMMI joint venture?  How soon would you anticipate expanding beyond the first six markets?

The reception has been really good. We have several clients and we’re in discussion with many more. When I talk to programmers both on a local market level and nationally, one of their highest priorities is making sure we do have a measure of all activity out of homes. So the demand seems to be there. We’ve started to offer it, but a lot of people are waiting to see what it looks like before they make commitments.

Now that we have started to deliver the ratings information, we’ve seen some pretty interesting examples of the impact in some programs. We’ve had ESPN and Zenith Optimedia and, yes, many clients are excited now that we’ve actually started to release the data.

Anything else that you would like to comment on?

It has been a year during which a lot has occurred. When we look at what we’re focused on – and one of the top projects continues to be measuring video and advertising on all the different platforms – it encompasses a broad range of issues, including our investments, technology in AP and measuring beyond traditional television across different screens. But while some of the strategy remains the same as it was a year ago, the pace at which we’re trying to deliver and actually get that information to clients has increased.

--Carl Marcucci