Pulse vs Nielsen

A media team planning spend has to know how many people a channel reaches, and that is Nielsen's work. In 2022, its US National TV Panel reached 42,000 homes, covering 101,000 viewers, and an advertiser deciding where a national TV budget goes works from measurement of that kind, since the size and make-up of an audience decide what each placement is worth to the brand.

A creative team preparing a campaign may first want to see which creative strategies and trends are showing up across advertising, before it writes the creative brief for its agency. Nielsen's Ad Intel AI surfaces those strategies and trends, so a team that plans its creative against the wider ad market, or an agency preparing a pitch, has a reason to work with Nielsen. A strategist who has to explain why a competitor's campaigns look the way they do can start from that picture of the market rather than from a handful of ads collected by hand.

Pulse runs interviews with viewers about a single piece of creative. The ad can be shown to a participant partway through the interview, and Pulse's video insights read their behavior and emotion on screen as they react to it. Every quote in the findings traces to the transcript of the viewer who said it. When the question belongs to the trade rather than the audience, such as how media buyers at agencies judged a campaign's placement, Pulse can find those buyers through its B2B and expert recruitment, and their interviews can sit beside the viewers' in the same research program.

1. Turn the media-plan audience into a profile. Take the audience a campaign was planned against, such as adults who stream a service's drama slate each week on a connected television, and describe it in a Pulse brief as a profile with a screener, then add the question the brand wants answered and the topics the interview should reach.
2. Bring in subscribers, or recruit to the profile. A broadcaster or streaming service with its own subscriber list can upload it, or share a link with those viewers in its app or its newsletter. Pulse recruits everyone else the study needs to the profile set out in the brief, wherever the plan runs, including viewers who have never subscribed.
3. Time the study to the flight. Launch the study while the campaign is on air, so the people interviewed are talking about a spot they may have seen that week, and the planners can hear what viewers made of it while the flight is running and before the next buy is set.
4. Let the moderator chase the why. Let the AI moderator follow each answer, asking again whenever a viewer's reason for switching off a show or skipping an ad comes back thin, while every viewer hears questions drawn from the same guide, so one viewer's answers can be read against another's.
5. Size what the interviews turn up. Where the interviews surface a reason worth measuring, such as viewers skipping an ad because of its length, add a Pulse survey to find how many in the audience share it, since surveys run alongside the interviews when the question becomes how many.
6. Give planners and the brand their own copies. Export the themes as slides for the planners and as a Word report for the brand team, with each viewer quote filed under the theme it supports and a highlight reel of viewers explaining their choices, ready to play at the start of the next campaign review.

• Nielsen alternatives