MRC Pulls Accreditation From December '16 Nielsen PPMs

Issues With December PPMs

The MEDIA RATING COUNCIL released word this afternoon that it will withhold its accreditation from the DECEMBER 2016 NIELSEN AUDIO PPM service reports for those markets in which the PPM service is currently accredited.

The MRC wrote in a statement: "Accreditation of the DECEMBER 2016 PPM service reports will be withheld until such time that NIELSEN AUDIO has fully addressed MRC’s inquiries and has completed additional analyses requested by MRC that demonstrate to MRC's satisfaction that the PPM service disruption that affected, at minimum, the first week of the DECEMBER reporting period, has been addressed and appropriately disclosed in a manner that is fully consistent with the MRC Minimum Standards for Media Rating Research.

"Since the PPM connectivity disruption, NIELSEN has shared information with MRC about the outage, NIELSEN AUDIO’s recovery efforts, and related data analyses NIELSEN AUDIO has performed. However, MRC believes the data analyses related to this incident with which we have been presented by NIELSEN AUDIO, in addition to NIELSEN AUDIO’s responses to a series of questions related to the incident that MRC has raised to NIELSEN AUDIO, are incomplete, and therefore MRC and its Radio Committee and Board of Directors are unable to conclude as yet on this matter. NIELSEN has committed to continue to work with MRC on this issue. Therefore, MRC has chosen to withhold its accreditation for the DECEMBER PPM reports to which it would have otherwise been applicable until we receive responses and appropriate analyses of the impacted data that we deem satisfactory to address these concerns. We will update the marketplace at a future time should this situation change and we believe these issues have been sufficiently addressed to reinstate MRC accreditation of the December 2016 PPM estimates."

A NIELSEN spokesperson told ALL ACCESS, "Following the PPM connectivity issue during week one of the DECEMBER survey, NIELSEN's Data Science team conducted a rigorous analysis of data quality and we firmly stand behind the DECEMBER PPM monthly estimates. The sample performance for the DECEMBER report is inline with the standards that have been used in prior months for the 26 accredited markets. While we disagree with the MRC's decision to withhold accreditation of the DECEMBER PPM monthly data, NIELSEN remains committed to the MRC accreditation process."

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