Nielsen is making a big push to reshape not just its service offerings, but the way you see their brand. Chief David Calhoun has his minions launching a "global brand awareness campaign" (i.e. they're the exclusive advertiser for an issue of the NYT sports mag Play) to show off "the new Nielsen," which, having dropped the name VNU last year, wants to be known for more than issuing faulty reports on TV audiences. They want to issue faulty reports on all media consumption.

Launching today is PreView, an initially free offering that takes Nielsen's measurement data, pastes it into an Excel spreadsheet, and plugs lots of fancy formulas to reveal stats like: Of 400 hundred recent films, "titles grossing at least $100 million in sales are likely to have received elevated levels of attention on blogs." For realzies? At least they're not asking you to pay for this crap.

And that's just the beginning. As we've previously reported, Nielsen wants to track all of your media consumption, twenty-four hours a day. That means whether you're watching YouTube clips or TV shows on your computer or if you're watching a romantic dramedy on your iPod. And how will they accomplish this? Says SAI: "The company wants to hand out gadgets to Nielsen panelists that attach to cell phones and portable devices and record what gets played." Which we make for a totally authentic environment to collect accurate statistics. Another brilliant business move, N.