SCEA partners with The Nielsen Company

Sony has announced a joint initiative with The Nielsen Company to measure game network advertising.

SCEA plans to share data from its PS3 systems and PlayStation Network, allowing Nielsen to analyze the data to create measurements to calculate the reach, frequency, and effectiveness of game network advertising for the benefit of the industry.

The data will come from enabled first- and third-party software titles, with an initial rollout of the measurement system in North America.

"SCEA's contribution of its game census data, combined with Nielsen's data sets, represents a milestone in our efforts to bring greater legitimacy and accuracy to game advertising measurement," said Jeff Herrmann, vice president of Nielsen Games.

"By marrying SCEA's server-side data traffic with our standard ratings metrics, we will be able to provide advertisers with a much more robust picture of the impact of their game network advertising and of those consumers who are actually playing games, all while preserving consumer privacy."

As part of its syndicated GamePlay Metrics measurement product, scheduled to launch in July 2007, Nielsen will provide metered game usage and demographic information by game title, genre, and platform. User activity from across the PlayStation Network will help inform Nielsen's data.

The initial results of this joint effort are expected to be released later this year.