Student Contributions - Week 5

Well, the Nielsen story did invite some strong-ish reactions from folks here and there. Good, good.

Here's what Anshul has to say about his experience:

Hi Prof. Voleti,


As discussed in class today, I wanted to mention some shortcomings of Nielsen data that I noticed in my line of work.

I worked in media planning and buying, and used the TAM data quite extensively in order to make decisions regarding the best TV channels to use, as well as in the post analysis of campaigns.
However, quite often, Nielsen data would throw up seemingly garbled figures, due to the following reasons:

1. Insufficient sample size in some markets for the selected TG. This was fine for some weeks, but not others indicating that the sample size could vary from week to week for the same TG and market.

2. Missing data on some ads resulted from inaccurate reporting (missing figures, for instance). In some cases, this was due to inaccurate coding of the creatives.

A possible reason for the errors is that there is still a lot of manual work involved between the time data is collected to when it is shared with agencies.

Therefore, we had to always be careful while using Nielsen TAM data, and tried to cross-check it wherever possible. That was, however, not always possible and we just had to assume that the TAM data was accurate.

This was my observation and thought I’d share. Hope this helps!
Kind regards,
Anshul Joshi

Thanks, Anshul.

Any further student contributions will be put on up here.

Sudhir