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Addressing Biases in Multicultural & Inclusive Identity Data
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MRC’s review of approach to validation studies:

• Source data selection process

• Maintenance procedures for databases

• Identity data sorting, linking

• Customer qualification

• Report generation, contents and disclosures

• Overall transparency of methods and processes

• Privacy assessment/inquiries (limited)

• Basic IT control information
• Project versus standard production procedures

What exactly will MRC look at in the benchmarking study?
MRC will oversee a standard Nielsen process involving checking the accuracy and coverage of demographic
information provided by third parties. MRC will monitor the extractions of Nielsen consumer addresses into a
test file, as well as the distribution of those addresses by Nielsen to the third-party data providers for matching.
Nielsen will then report how well the demographic data matches what they know to be true about the
households.

Is Nielsen giving out the addresses of its television panelists?
No. Nielsen will provide a sample 100 times larger than the Nielsen samples, so it will be impossible to determine
which households are in the television sample.

Why is Nielsen involved?
Nielsen has a strong, MRC-audited, observational dataset in which household demographic insights are derived
by directly observing the household. It is a good industry-accepted benchmark for a comparison of data derived
from other sources.

Will Nielsen see our data and gain a competitive advantage over us?
No, the data coming into Nielsen will be received by only one person and anonymized immediately so that the
internal Nielsen analytics team has no access to the name of the company that created the file.

What is MRC?
Media Rating Council was started in the 1960s, at the request of the U.S. Congress, to audit media ratings, and
has become the industry’s pre-eminent auditor of measurement practices and standards.