The end result? The housing bubble burst, millions lost their homes (and/or jobs), trillions in real estate value was wiped out, and only recently have some markets fully recovered.

It's a cautionary tale about the dangers of flawed analysis and faulty measurement, not to mention institutional complacency. And the bad news is that lately we've been repeating some of the same mistakes.

This time it's the thriving New York state entertainment industry that's on the hook. Roughly 60,000 jobs and more than $12 billion in wages are at stake in the TV and film sectors alone in New York, the country's second biggest entertainment powerhouse. New York's economy took a beating during the pandemic, as everyone knows, so maintaining the robustness of our large and dynamic television, film, and digital entertainment industry is paramount. To do so, however, advertisers, producers, and giant media companies – many headquartered right here in New York – need to know which shows are succeeding, and which are failing. They need to know if and when their programming connects with the American people.

To solve this problem, the Nielsen Company has for decades been studying Americans' viewing habits, mostly in their own homes, using special equipment that records what select families watch. It's a system that seemed to work great back in the '60s and '70s, when everyone watched broadcast TV, because, in terms of home entertainment, it was one of the only games in town. Since the 1980s, though, technological and social changes have revolutionized the entertainment industry, particularly television. A growing chorus of voices within the industry has been criticizing Nielsen for sticking to its time-tested, but arguably obsolete, methods of measuring “audience reach.”

During the pandemic, these rumblings of criticism became a deafening roar. Nielsen not only failed to update adequately its methodology to account for the incredibly diverse ways in which Americans now access television programs – from streaming services to smartphones – but it also suspended its home visitations, causing its estimates of viewership to become less reliable than ever. Nielsen actually claimed that overall TV ratings went down at a time when untold millions of Americans were under lockdown, despite the fact that numerous trustworthy measures were indicating the exact opposite. Eventually Nielsen itself had to apologize for the failures in its analysis and reporting. These apologies did little to help the entertainment industry, though, which lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of the negative implications that Nielsen’s inaccurate ratings estimates had for TV advertising sales. For New York, that meant job losses and show cancellations – on top of one of the worst recessions in the state's history.