Nielsen Stumbles, Upstarts Gain in New Measurement Multiverse
Linda Yaccarino threw down the gauntlet in her May 16 pitch to advertisers at NBCUniversal’s upfront presentation. “We are liberating you from what we all know is broken and finally breaking away from legacy,” the chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU told the crowd inside Radio City Music Hall. Though she didn’t say the word “Nielsen,” Yaccarino was taking direct aim at the company that’s held a virtual monopoly on TV ratings for decades — a dominance that’s coming under its biggest challenge to date.
Yaccarino concluded her piece about ad measurement by saying she’s looking forward to “a future where multiple currencies deliver massive results.” That sort of marketplace is beginning to take shape, as several other companies — including web analytics heavyweight Comscore and newer players like iSpot.tv and VideoAmp — vie for positioning to help buyers and sellers of commercials quantify success in the multibillion-dollar TV ad market.
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“We really do feel like it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Samantha Rose, senior vp strategic investment at Horizon Media, whose clients include Burger King and Capital One and which itself is committed to doing up to 15 percent of its upfront business using new measurement tools. “It really will be a multi-currency ecosystem — including Nielsen, of course.”
Nielsen, led by CEO David Kenny, has come under intense criticism for a series of missteps with its ratings product in the past few years, ranging from claims that it let the size and quality of its national panel slip during the early months of the pandemic to undercounting home viewers at the start of the 2020-21 season. The issues led to the Media Rating Council, an industry oversight board, stripping Nielsen of its accreditation for national TV ratings last year (the firm can apply for re-approval but has not done so). NBCUniversal issued a public call for competitive measurement tools before announcing a deal with iSpot to become its alternative currency of choice. Media companies (including NBCU) and ad buyers have continued to use Nielsen ratings, but the accreditation loss “instigated everybody to re-look at these new vendors,” says Rose.
The sense that there’s business to be had also has led to an influx of capital into measurement companies. In just the past six weeks, Goldman Sachs invested $325 million in iSpot. VideoAmp has acquired ad tech company Elsy, and analytics company EDO landed an $80 million funding infusion led by Shamrock Capital. Nielsen itself is going private in a $16 billion deal with a group of private equity firms led by Evergreen Coast Capital Corp. and Brookfield Business Partners.
But that doesn’t mean Nielsen will suddenly be crowded out of the marketplace it has long cornered. Disney has publicly committed to continuing to work with the company as it moves toward a cross-platform measurement product called Nielsen One. Agencies like Horizon are still doing big portions of their business based on Nielsen currency. And while the company’s name hadn’t come up in any upfront presentations as of press time, ad sales chiefs at Fox (Marianne Gambelli) and Disney (Rita Ferro) focused less on how they measure success and more on assuring ad buyers that their investment would, in fact, reach big, desirable audiences.
Jon Steinlauf, head of ad sales at Warner Bros. Discovery, staked out a middle ground at his company’s May 18 upfront. While he didn’t call out Nielsen as explicitly as NBCU’s Yaccarino did, he spoke about Warner Bros. Discovery’s ad tech capabilities and membership in the network-owned OpenAP consortium — in front of a screen showing logos for Comscore, iSpot and VideoAmp. “Our goal is to learn as much as possible,” Steinlauf said, “and finally have a multi-currency marketplace that benefits everyone.”
With multiple tools and bases for measurement, however, comes the need for understanding what each tool can do best. Ad agencies and media companies are spending time getting on the same page about which currencies to use and which tools are better for, say, broad-based demographic measurements and which ones are more suited for granular insights.
What seems clear, however, is that the notion that a single currency that makes ad-sales transactions run more smoothly — an idea Nielsen has long traded on — isn’t what’s most important to a lot of ad buyers. How many firms survive or thrive in a more competitive marketplace remains to be seen, but a fragmenting of the business for at least the next few years seems likely.
“I think it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. There might be certain companies that are more focused on performance measurement and others that are focused on straight campaign and audience measurement,” says Horizon Media’s Rose. “It’s hard to say how many will be in consideration in the future, but from a currency perspective I certainly think it will be more than one.”
Nielsen’s Ratings Rivals
Comscore The online analytics giant aims to bring its big-data approach to measurement across TV platforms while powering box office data.
iSpot.tv The 10-year-old company, which has a partnership with NBCUniversal, specializes in second-by-second measurement of ad impressions.
VideoAmp In addition to its own set of measurement and tools, the company touts its commitment to maintaining privacy for the viewers in its data set.
OpenAP While not a direct measurement competitor to Nielsen, the network-owned consortium is used to make targeted, data-driven ad buys.
A version of this story first appeared in the May 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
