NBCUniversal today reinforced its view that Nielsen isn’t the only game in town for audience data used to sell airtime to advertisers.

Comcast’s entertainment arm– the No. 1 seller of TV ads —  says it will sell $1 billion of its inventory in this year’s upfront market using data from its Audience Targeting Platform (ATP), which includes information from set top boxes and third party sources.

For the last two years the company only offered ATP deals to what it calls “certain brand segments and only during the Upfront.” But this year it will be available to all advertisers, and in the scatter market as well as the upfront.

“By bringing together premium content at scale with guarantees based on business priorities, we’re giving clients the best of both worlds: The audiences they need and the targeting they crave which is superior to other platforms,” says NBCU Chairman of Advertising Sales and Client Partnerships Linda Yaccarino.

In other words, NBCU wants advertisers to know that they can fine-tune their purchases to reach viewers with sharply defined characteristics — similar to what online services offer — as opposed to broad demographics such as men or women in a particular age group.

This is part of NBCU’s effort to promote its Symphony strategy: Buyers can promote their wares using the company’s celebrities across broadcast, cable, and digital properties– as well as Comcast’s distribution assets and theme parks.

NBCU says ATP buys will be “fully guaranteed” to deliver “precisely defined customers” across all platforms.

The company notes that last year the Symphony strategy “helped drive record-breaking success across all parts of its business” — including for Universal Pictures’ The Secret Life of Pets. 

In addition to the expanded ATP sales, NBCU says that it will expand offerings on its linear TV networks for computer-driven programmatic deals. Last year they were just available “on a limited basis” in the scatter market. But this year it will also be sold in the upfront market.

//deadline.com/2017/03/nbcuniversal-offer-1b-ad-inventory-upfront-nielsen-data-1202034199/

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NBCU Says Nielsen’s Digital Ratings Are “Not Ready” Ahead Of March Launch

NBCUniversal has “deep concerns” that Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings (TCR) — adding ratings for digital viewing of TV shows to the current numbers — are “not ready for release,” the Comcast-owned company told Nielsen in a letter sent on Tuesday, but that surfaced today.

The complaint from the No. 1 seller of TV ads could be significant: Networks have wanted the change as they try to persuade advertisers that they’re still a good buy at a time when traditional ratings are declining.

Nielsen says that it “stands behind” the TCR effort, which remains “on schedule to syndicate data on March 1.”

NBCU’s letter from Advertising Sales and Client Partnerships Chairman Linda Yaccarino says that TCR is “far from meeting” requirements that it offer “a reasonable degree of accuracy and transparency” — making its release “premature” and “irresponsible.”

“Some say, ‘something is better than nothing’,” Yaccarino writes. “We disagree. Bad, inaccurate and misleading data is far worse than no data at all.”

Among her complaints: TCR doesn’t include “leading Pay TV operators and digital video distributors.” It mixes different forms of audience measurement, including one from YouTube “that is not yet vetted.” It depends on “opaque Facebook data” to make sure that viewer counts aren’t duplicated. It has “no quality control measure for digital fraud” And it “fails to measure Out-of-Home viewing.”

As a result, Yaccarino says, “Nielsen’s specific promotion of TCR as a tool to effectively inform smarter business decisions including media allocation will be detrimental for all stakeholders — advertisers, agencies, publishers and content distributors.”

Nielsen says that it is still working to “enhance and refine our product with ongoing updates as we work with clients during this period of evaluation….We do not underestimate the importance of the rigor of this work, as clients use our metrics to make decisions on content, programming, distribution, and as a currency for ad planning and settlement.”

NBCU’s letter doesn’t appear to worry Wall Street. Nielsen shares are down less than 1% today.

TCR “was never going to meaningfully alter Nielsen’s dominant position in this business,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser says. Problems with the product “will eventually be remedied” — and what really matters are what advertisers, not networks, think. Few of them “have had significant exposure to the TCR product.”