OREANDA-NEWS. Today Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) announces a game-changing enhancement to N-Score, a syndicated solution that assesses the casting and endorsement potential of a wide array of celebrities—actors, athletes, musicians and well-known personalities. For the first time, N-Score will offer a "Fan Affinity" score that will quantify a celebrity's fan base to fit particular content or brands. This will provide the industry with a quantifiable way to research celebrities and brands based on fan behavior, complementing intuition in order to help inform talent decisions with actionable metrics.

This new capability leverages Nielsen assets for a 360-degree view of what "fans" watch, what they listen to, where they shop and what they buy. Nielsen will offer these Fan Affinity insights for over a thousand celebrities based on more than 6,000 behaviors, brands and programs.

"In today's media environment context continues to be paramount and being able to leverage Nielsen's N-Score to find talent that is specific to our programming, and especially our high-quality brand, is absolutely essential. N-Score's fan affinity behaviors also serve to help us align with national advertisers who want their messages to benefit by the halo effect provided by the Hallmark brand. To quote an industry executive, 'brands are like people, they are judged by the company they keep,'" says Jess Aguirre, Crown Media Networks' (Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel) ?SVP, Media Research & Consumer Insight.

The enhancement integrates Nielsen's gold-standard media and consumer panels—including Scarborough, Homescan and our currency-grade TV panel with N-Score values —in order to allow decision makers to evaluate and select talent in a data-driven way. N-Score values are calculated using a proprietary algorithm which considers a multitude of celebrity characteristics. The Nielsen Fan Affinity score ranks celebrities based on how likely their fans are to watch certain content, exhibit consumer behaviors or have lifestyle preferences.

"Finding the right celebrity drives impactful results for ALL parties in the casting, advertising and programming ecosystem. Nielsen's enhanced N-Score capabilities can now provide quantifiable and actionable insights in order to better understand a celebrity's fan base, helping to give content producers and advertisers the ability to make informed talent and endorsement choices as well as program placement and ad sales decisions," said Michele Orlick, SVP Client Consulting, Nielsen.