-By Katy Bachman

Setting its sights on the burgeoning, $1.3 billion out-of-home video industry, Nielsen is close to announcing a new service that will deliver standardized monthly audience metrics for OOH video networks.

Nielsen has already issued its first report for Ideacast’s health club network. Sources confirmed other networks have also signed up for the service, among them Gas Station TV, Arena Media Networks and CBS Outernet.

Nielsen, which is the parent of Mediaweek, has conducted custom studies for video networks for some 20 years. Other companies have conducted proprietary research for place-based networks. But standardized metrics could be a game changer for a medium advertisers find attractive but that lacks the metrics to give it a fair evaluation.

“Measurement will bring some order to the whole medium,” said Jim Spaeth, president of Sequent Partners, a research consultancy retained by the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau to write research standards to be released later this summer.

Nielsen will issue reports free to agency clients, which it does with its cinema reports.
For Ideacast, it takes the business to the next level. “Nielsen has a database of 30,000 planners and buyers, and they’re sending this to their entire database,” said Jason Brown, president, sales and marketing at Ideacast, which has already begun selling with the data.
“Our business plan and internal projections are based [on these reports]. It’s now our currency.”

While Nielsen is the first research firm to try to establish currency for the medium, it may not go unchallenged. Several other players, including Arbitron, Knowledge Networks, Edison Research, Peoplecount and MRI, as well as TruMedia and Quividi, have developed research and have worked with OVAB to develop guidelines.

“There are a lot of companies out there [looking to measure OOH video]—two companies may also work together,” said Suzanne Alecia, OVAB’s president. “Our guidelines are a rule book for any research provider to use.”