NEW YORK—Smartly, an AI-powered ad tech platform, and Roku have announced that they are working together to offer tools that will bring the speed, precision, and measurability of social advertising to CTV.

At the core of this partnership is a direct connection between Smartly and Roku Ads Manager, Roku’s outcomes-driven CTV platform, via the Roku Ads API. This allows marketers to run CTV campaigns using the tools they already use for social, making it easy to activate campaigns on TV quickly and reach new audiences with greater ease and measurable impact.

“CTV’s performance era is here,” said Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly. “The best advertising follows attention across every screen, and streaming is where we can now finally unlock the same proven results. Partnering with Roku brings the same rigor, scale, and incrementality advertisers have built on social to the biggest screen in the home. Together, we are creating a structural shift in how brands grow.”

The partnership also streamlines creative development and execution, allowing advertisers to adapt existing social assets for the TV screen. This saves both time and resources by eliminating the need to rebuild separate ads for each platform.

“Advertisers want CTV to work as hard as their best-performing channels,” said Patrick Harris, SVP, Global Advertising Sales & Partnerships, Roku. “At Roku, we are strategically positioned to deliver that at scale. This partnership with Smartly makes it simple for brands to bring the speed and precision of social into TV, enabling them to turn proven strategies into measurable growth on the biggest screen.”

For more information, visit advertising.roku.com or smartly.io.

NEW YORK—Comcast Advertising struck a deal to integrate transaction data from Affinity Solutions into LENS, the AI-powered audience discovery engine that is a key part of its Outcomes+ solution.

Adding the data from Affinity, a provider of consumer purchasing insights and analytics, will help advertisers find untapped audiences, optimize spend toward incremental reach and measure campaign performance based on real consumer purchases, Comcast Advertising said.

“Advertisers increasingly want to plan and buy media based on real consumer purchase behavior, not proxy metrics like clicks,” said Dawn Lee Williamson, chief revenue officer, media solutions at Comcast Advertising. “As the performance engine for TV, Comcast Advertising helps brands apply those insights to identify untapped audiences, uncover incremental opportunities and connect TV exposure across traditional, streaming and addressable TV to real business outcomes. By bringing Affinity’s purchase data into our already rich first-party data environment, we’re making that capability even stronger.”

Combining viewership data from more than 30 million Comcast cable-TV homes with Affinity’s transaction-level dataset of more than 100 million consumers across thousands of brands and categories will let advertisers identify and reach high-value audiences on demand based on real purchase behavior, Comcast said. This ensures campaigns are delivered to the consumers most likely to drive business outcomes, it said.

More specifically, the integration will allow advertisers to:

• By building audiences off verified credit and debit card spending, not modeled behavior or intent signals, brands can target proven category buyers, reach competitor customers, re-engage lapsed purchasers, and reach high-value spenders with greater confidence.
• The partnership also helps advertisers close the loop by measuring the same target audience identified through Affinity’s purchase insights. By linking ad exposure through Comcast’s household data to post-campaign purchase activity in Affinity’s transaction database, brands get direct proof of business impact across in-store and online sales.
• The combined dataset also helps advertisers identify where incremental audiences exist across Comcast’s traditional TV and streaming inventory, so budgets can be directed toward the channels and dayparts that drive genuine reach expansion instead of duplicated exposure.

“This partnership brings our consumer purchase insights directly into premium TV, proving that transaction data is just as powerful in television as it is in digital and retail media,” said Damian Garbaccio, chief commercial and marketing officer at Affinity Solutions. “Together with Comcast Advertising, we’re giving marketers a stronger way to find the right audiences, activate against real purchase behavior and measure the business impact that matters most.”

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced a new integration with Mediaocean’s Prisma platform that will improve audience measurement and allow marketers to maintain a single, consistent audience definition throughout the campaign lifecycle.

This integration and its resulting capabilities will officially launch in September, just in time for the fall TV season, Nielsen said.

Prisma is an enterprise-level, end-to-end media management and campaign execution platform that acts as a central “system of record” for advertising agencies and brands, that is designed to unify workflows across digital, linear (TV/radio), print and out-of-home (OOH) channels.

As part of the integration, Nielsen will provide reporting on advanced audience segments for data-driven linear (DDL) national TV campaigns to expand the integration of its Big Data + Panel audience measurement solution directly within Mediaocean’s Prisma platform.

This will help drive greater industry interoperability by allowing marketers to maintain a single, consistent audience definition throughout advertising campaigns. Clients can define advanced audience segments (first- and third-party and Nielsen-owned) within Nielsen Audience Builder and then see the corresponding measurement metrics directly within Mediaocean.

This will allow marketers to move beyond traditional age and gender based demographics by enabling more advanced audience definitions to be applied consistently across ad planning and measurement workflows.

The collaboration also brings greater continuity and visibility into data-driven linear campaigns, giving advertisers a better way to understand and evaluate multi-screen ad performance.

“Advertising’s next frontier will be built on true interoperability — not just data sharing, but a consistent audience definition that travels from planning all the way through to measurement,” explained Nielsen Chief Product Officer Akhil Parekh. “Together with Mediaocean, we're giving marketers exactly that: the ability to define audiences once and then to carry that precision across the entire campaign lifecycle.”

“The big theme here is consistency,” said Prisma Chief Product Officer Drew Kane. “As the advertising ecosystem becomes increasingly fragmented, maintaining a consistent audience definition across planning, activation, and measurement has become a challenge. By teaming up with Nielsen, we are helping to create a more connected workflow that brings greater visibility and alignment across the marketing journey.”

In addition, Nielsen announced that S&P Global Mobility is integrating insights from its Polk Automotive Solutions Portfolio, a leader in automotive advanced audiences insights, so that marketers can better reach customers in this sector. (Polk intelligence encompasses nearly 35 years of vehicle owner history, more than one billion vehicle transactions annually, and more than 650 million vehicles tracked daily.)

That means marketers and agencies can now leverage Polk Audiences across Nielsen’s planning and measurement products, including Nielsen Audience Builder, Nielsen Media Impact, Nielsen ONE Planning and Nielsen ONE Ads. These audiences will also be available against Nielsen's Big Data+Panel data and integrated into Nielsen's digital planning/measurement solutions.

In addition, MRI-Simmons and S&P Global Mobility are expanding advanced audience capabilities into Nielsen ONE.

MRI-Simmons, a leading provider of survey-based insights about American consumers, is expanding its relationship with Nielsen to deliver new, research-driven audience insights within Nielsen ONE planning and measurement tools.

Taken together, these developments mean improved campaign performance, via even better data-driven planning, measurement, and optimization capabilities, Nielsen reported.

NEW YORK—A new study from Gracenote highlights how ongoing problems with data and measurement are limiting the shift of ad budgets from linear TV to CTV advertising.

The new "TV Audiences Have Shifted. Ad Dollars Have Not: The Need for Content Intelligence in the CTV Era," report finds that 86% of U.S. media planners would move more linear budgets to CTV if show-level targeting and reporting were available.

The reallocation would not stop at traditional TV. Sixty-five percent say they would also consider shifting spend from programmatic video and 63% from display, suggesting richer content intelligence could help CTV win a greater share of digital ad spend across the broader media mix.

"Buyers aren't asking for more complexity — they're asking for the same transparency they've relied on for decades in linear TV," said Ryan Moore, chief business officer at Gracenote. "Bringing show-level visibility to CTV gives the channel a clearer path to bigger budgets, not just from linear but across the digital video ecosystem. When buyers have the insight to validate placement quality and prove impact, CTV becomes more accountable and competitive."

The report spotlights a major blind spot in connected TV that Gracenote defines as the CTV Data Gap.

While advertisers have embraced CTV's audience targeting, the market still lacks a standardized view of the programming attributes behind each ad impression. Without that content layer, buyers lose confidence at every stage — from planning to post-campaign reporting. This uncertainty makes decision-makers hesitant to fund CTV at scale, the researchers reported.

They also argue that the Gracenote Content Graph helps close this gap by giving advertisers a source-validated view of CTV inventory, including descriptors such as genre, rating and language, along with program-level metadata and unique content identifiers.

Additional findings from the report include:

• 89% of media planners anticipate shifting more budget from linear TV to CTV over the next 12 to 24 months, underscoring CTV's continued momentum.
• 100% of programmatic traders say show-level transparency is very or extremely important for ensuring brand safety and inventory quality in CTV.
• 95% of programmatic traders agree that the absence of show-level signals prevents them from advocating for more CTV budget during planning.
• 80% of traders would shift budget from audience-targeted to contextually targeted CTV with actionable content signals.
• 47% of media planners cite limited show- or content-level data as a primary barrier to moving more spend into CTV.

Advertisers, agencies and media partners can download the full report here.

NEW YORK—Nielsen has introduced Predictive Sales Lift, a new feature that helps marketers and agencies gain better insights into media campaign outcomes.

Nielsen said it is introducing this new capability to address marketers’ needs for a holistic view of campaign outcomes in a fragmented media landscape.

Available for current Nielsen One Ads customers, the new offering predicts sales lift and incremental revenue for a given Nielsen One Ads campaign. It utilizes key campaign measurement performance indicators (such as reach, impression count, distribution of impressions across platforms) and brand characteristics (such as category, brand size and the purchase frequency the campaign is targeting) to deliver these predictions.

Predictive Sales Lift utilizes sales lift results from hundreds of historical Nielsen One Ads campaigns as the basis for its analysis and predictions, Nielsen explained. This new feature will be live for general availability in May.

“Predictive Sales Lift is a major outcomes differentiator because it gives our clients a full-funnel view of campaign performance, underpinned by our Nielsen One measurement foundation, expertise and insights,” said Nichole Henderson, senior vice president of Global Measurement & Outcomes Product, Nielsen. “The industry is headed towards an outcomes-driven future and this is the latest proof point of how we continue to deliver for our clients and the industry on this front.”

Predictive Sales Lift can be applied to media types spanning digital and CTV.

Industry verticals that may find this solution to be especially useful include retail, financial services, technology, telecommunications, travel and tourism, media and entertainment and healthcare and pharmaceuticals, Nielsen said.

This solution is presently available only in the U.S.

NEW YORK—DoubleVerify has achieved Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for TikTok Video Viewability, making it the first measurement vendor to receive the accreditation, the company said.

“We are proud to be the first measurement provider to achieve MRC accreditation for TikTok video viewability reporting,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify. “As advertising investment continues to grow across video-centric social platforms like TikTok, independent verification plays a critical role in ensuring transparency and accountability. With accredited measurement informed by tens of trillions of historical ad transactions, advertisers can evaluate campaign effectiveness with greater confidence and ensure their media investments deliver real value.”

The accreditation covers DV’s direct measurement and reporting of video ads served to the TikTok mobile app, including impressions, viewable impressions and related viewability metrics, as well as sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) filtration. Already accredited for open web inventory, these metrics are now extended to TikTok campaigns, with reporting available through a dedicated dashboard within DV Pinnacle®, the company’s unified service and analytics reporting platform.

“We congratulate DoubleVerify for extending their Video Viewability and SIVT accreditation to include measurement of TikTok traffic as well as continued accreditation of Property Level Ad Verification and Attention”, said George Ivie, MRC CEO. “This accreditation demonstrates DoubleVerify’s continued commitment to independent validation of compliance with industry standards.”

DV also achieved MRC accreditation across two key measurement capabilities, including:

• Extended DV Authentic Attention® accreditation, now covering metrics for authentic non-viewable and authentic modeled video impressions.
• New property-level ad verification language accreditations, bringing DV’s coverage to 55 accredited languages for domain and mobile app environments and 10 languages for CTV applications.

DV first earned MRC accreditation in February 2013 and has an extensive suite of accredited pre- and post-bid products across display, video and connected TV environments, for which accreditation was continued this year. For a full list of DV’s MRC accreditations, visit here.

CHICAGO, Ill.—Weigel Broadcasting Co. has announced that it has started working with OpenAP in the run-up to the Upfronts to provide advertisers with better data and access to inventory on its portfolio of television networks, which include including MeTV, Heroes & Icons, Start TV, Dabl, Catchy Comedy, Story Television, MeTV Toons, MOVIES!, and WEST.

Launching ahead of the 2026 Upfront season, the partnership marks a significant step in Weigel’s move beyond traditional demographics to towards audience-based buying, which it says will enable advertisers to engage high-value, and often unexposed, audiences across its portfolio with greater precision, consistency and scale.

With OpenAP, Weigel Broadcasting Co. advertisers have the ability to define audiences once and activate seamlessly across its portfolio of content, with the flexibility to activate through direct insertion order (IO), programmatic guaranteed (PG) or private marketplace (PMP) transactions.

“Combined with recent announcements regarding datafuelX and VideoAmp, our partnership with OpenAP represents an important step forward in how we bring advanced capabilities to market as we aim to help our clients simplify cross-platform buying and deliver measurable outcomes with greater impact more efficiently,” said John Hendricks, executive vice-president, Weigel Broadcasting Co.

For more information, visit www.openap.tv and https://www.weigelbroadcasting.com/.

IRVINE, Calif.—Viant Technology has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire TVision Insights, an attention measurement provider that delivers second-by-second, eyes-on-screen attention, co-viewership and in-room presence data for TV viewing.

The $40 million acquisition is Viant’s largest deal to date. Previously it has acquired MySpace, IRIS.TV, and Lockr.

With this acquisition, Viant strengthens its AI-powered programmatic platform by integrating TVision's proprietary attention signals directly into its buying platform. Combined with Viant's Household ID and IRIS_ID, this delivers immediate improvements in inventory valuation, bidding precision, and return on ad spend, exclusively within the Viant platform.

"Every advertising platform measures its own performance today, which makes it difficult for advertisers to understand what's actually working. With TVision, we are providing advertisers a true market-wide view of how their advertising performs, free from any platform's self-attribution bias. While our competitors measure themselves, Viant measures the market,” said Tim Vanderhook, CEO and co-founder of Viant. “Advertisers can now use attention, co-viewing and in-room signals within Viant’s AI-powered buying platform giving them unparalleled strategic advantages, including a first-of-its-kind metric: the attention-adjusted CPM."

TVision's nationally representative panel uses advanced computer vision and Automatic Content Recognition technology to capture genuine viewer engagement across this entire ecosystem — giving advertisers a single, independent view of attention and enabling them to optimize spend toward impressions that are actually seen, the companies said.

"TVision was built to provide a more accurate and transparent view of how people engage with television and streaming content," said Yan Liu, CEO and co-founder of TVision. "By joining Viant, we can bring our measurement capabilities together with real-time activation and AI-powered optimization, helping advertisers turn attention insights into superior campaign performance."

Pursuant to the definitive purchase agreement, Viant will purchase TVision for a total consideration of $40.0 million, subject to customary adjustments and hold-backs, Viant said.

The deal consists of $22.5 million in cash and $17.5 million of shares of Viant’s Class A common stock delivered at closing. The transaction is expected to close in April 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.

Rockefeller Capital Management served as exclusive financial advisor to TVision in connection with the transaction.

NEW YORK—Nielsen and the local TV advertising platform Locality have announced the integration of Nielsen’s Media Data Engine (MDE) into Locality’s broadcast advertising infrastructure.

The partnership accelerates demographic audience delivery and modernizes local television measurement in the U.S., the two companies reported.

With the Integration, Locality becomes the first broadcast sales organization to implement Nielsen’s MDE offering at scale, enabling demographic audience delivery across all U.S. local markets to within four days of airing. Previously, this process took weeks.

The integration will also bring greater speed, consistency, and predictive capabilities to local broadcast campaigns.

“This partnership marks a major step forward for local broadcast,” said Ann Hailer, president of Broadcast at Locality. “For decades, local television has operated on delayed reporting cycles that limited agility and optimization. By integrating Nielsen’s Media Data Engine directly into our infrastructure, we are accelerating access to trusted audience insights and enabling advertisers and stations to make faster, more informed decisions across local markets.”

Nielsen’s MDE is a next-generation data infrastructure designed to improve the timeliness and scalability of measurement. Through this integration, Locality gains streamlined access to Nielsen Local TV data across all 210 local markets, enabling more responsive campaign planning, in-flight optimization, and performance monitoring.

“Local advertisers and broadcasters need the same level of speed and insight that has transformed national and digital media,” said Paul LeFort, managing director of Nielsen’s Local TV Client Services. “Our Media Data Engine was built to power the future of audience measurement and only Nielsen can reliably measure different demographics, including at the local level. By teaming up with Locality, we are introducing a new level of sophistication, innovation and possibilities for the entire local ad ecosystem.”

The integration reflects a broader shift toward converged planning and more dynamic campaign management. By speeding up access to demographic audience insights, Locality and Nielsen are enabling local broadcast to operate with greater transparency, comparability, and responsiveness across markets.

The partnership also lays the groundwork for future innovation, including predictive analytics, AI-driven modeling, and more advanced audience-based applications in linear television.

“This partnership is about building the infrastructure for the next generation of local advertising,” said Michael Collins, CEO of Locality. “Together with Nielsen, we are redefining what’s possible for local media, bringing broadcast measurement into a more modern, intelligent era.”

The integration is now live across all local markets.

NEW YORK—TelevisaUnivision has concluded a new, multi-year measurement and data agreement with Nielsen covering all of TelevisaUnivision’s properties, including its national and local broadcast, cable, streaming, radio operations.

“Measurement continues to evolve, and it is critical that it accurately reflects the scale, value, and influence of Hispanic audiences across platforms. We are pleased to continue working with Nielsen to support cross-platform measurement and to help ensure that brands and agencies can fully understand the audiences we reach every day,” said Tim Natividad, president of U.S. Advertising Sales and Marketing at TelevisaUnivision.

Services for the deal include Advanced Audiences, Ad-Supported Streaming Platform Ratings, Nielsen ONE Ads for Connected Television, and National out-of-home expansion.

TelevisaUnivision is home to the industry’s leading Spanish-language properties, including its flagship U.S. networks Univision, UNIMÁS, and TUDN, ViX, the world’s largest Spanish-language streaming service, and local affiliates across the country.

The new partnership follows several viewership milestones for TelevisaUnivision in early 2026, including Univision’s lead as the most-watched Spanish-language network in the U.S., N+ Univision programming leading February as the most-watched Spanish-language news; Premio Lo Nuestro ranking as the most-watched awards show among U.S. Hispanics for 34 consecutive years; and record-breaking audiences for soccer coverage across platforms.

Apogee Insight has announced the acquisition of PMA Research, a longstanding provider of market intelligence in the professional video projector and display market sectors.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In making the announcement, the two companies reported that the acquisition ensures continuity of PMA’s trusted research services while expanding resources, analytics capabilities, and coverage into new and rapidly growing areas.

“PMA Research has earned its reputation over decades as the definitive source of display market intelligence,” said Lee Dodson, co-principal of Apogee Insight. “Our priority is to preserve that legacy and build on it — expanding the scope of research, strengthening the data foundation, and giving our clients deeper insight into a display market that continues to evolve.”

PMA Research traces its origins to Pacific Media Associates, founded by Dr. Bill Coggshall, whose pioneering work established the industry standard for tracking and analyzing the global projector market. The company was renamed PMA Research in 2013 when longtime industry leader Nick Rogers assumed leadership following Dr. Coggshall’s retirement. With Rogers now retiring, Apogee Insight has acquired the PMA Research organization, including its extensive historical datasets, experienced research team, and its well-known portfolio of industry reports and services.

PMA Research will continue to operate with the same commitment to accuracy, independence, and integrity that has made it a trusted source for manufacturers, distributors, and channel partners worldwide. The existing PMA team will remain in place, including regional staff in Japan and Taiwan, ensuring uninterrupted service for clients.

Apogee Insight founders Lee Dodson and Sean Wargo will direct the organization going forward, expanding the research portfolio while investing in modern analytics technologies and additional proprietary data sources to support the evolving display market. Lee will serve as COO and Sean will serve as CAO - chief analytics officer, of PMA Research.

The acquisition will allow the organization to extend its coverage beyond displays and into adjacent and emerging categories. The combination of PMA Research’s syndicated data portfolio and Apogee Insight’s applied research and survey capabilities will offer the ability for companies to take the PMA Research resources farther than ever before while adding deep proprietary industry data to Apogee Insight, the two companies said.

“The display industry today spans far more technologies than when PMA first began tracking projectors,” said Sean Wargo, co-principal of Apogee Insight. “By combining PMA’s unmatched historical data with Apogee Insight’s analytics capabilities and expanded data sources, we can deliver a clearer, more complete view of more of the market while maintaining the integrity clients have always relied on.”

Nick Rogers, who has led PMA Research since 2013, will retire following the transition. “It has been a privilege to lead PMA Research and to work alongside such a talented and dedicated team,” said Rogers, “I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built together over the years and the trust the industry has placed in our work. As I step into retirement, I’m confident that PMA’s future is in great hands with Lee Dodson and Sean Wargo. Their experience, vision, and commitment to the integrity of the research make them the right leaders to guide the organization into its next chapter.”

Clients will continue to receive the same PMA Research reports, data services, and analyst support they rely on today, with additional offerings to be introduced as the combined organization expands its capabilities.

NEW YORK—A+E Global Media and Nielsen have announced a new, multiyear deal for measurement, media intelligence and analytics.

The deal includes measurement and media intelligence for A+E Global Media linear and digital brands, including A&E, Lifetime, The History Channel, LMN, and other assets.

As part of the agreement, Nielsen will provide A+E Global Media with linear and digital ratings, and information to help develop advertising, programming, and licensing strategies.

As part of the renewal, A+E Global Media will license new Nielsen services, including Nielsen National Respondent Level Data (NRLD), Nielsen Audience Builder (NAB) and the Data-Driven Linear API (DDL API). This builds on existing services for A+E Global Media, including Nielsen’s Streaming Content Ratings, Streaming Platform Ratings and Ad Intel.

NEW YORK—The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and 4As advertising industry group has released findings from a new joint study examining how major U.S. advertisers evaluate and prioritize media measurement across today’s increasingly complex TV and video ecosystem.

Authored by Sarah Mansfield, Alice Sylvester and Leslie Wood, the study finds that while advertisers have unprecedented access to sophisticated data, analytics and measurement tools, confidence has not advanced at the same pace.

The study, which was co-sponsored by Kochava, Nielsen, and TechEdge, said the biggest challenge facing advertisers is not a lack of data or data integrity, but the complexity of reconciling multiple systems, methodologies and competing “versions of the truth” across an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.

That complex ecosystem includes different platform-specific metrics, incompatible identity systems and differing approaches that are compounded by a vast quantity of data sources.

As a result, advertisers still struggle to clearly explain, defend or unify results with full confidence.

“The industry has built extraordinary measurement capabilities, but advertiser confidence depends on how well those systems work together,” said Jon Watts, managing director, CIMM. “Advertisers are navigating real challenges around comparability and identity in an increasingly fragmented environment. Encouragingly, they don’t see those barriers as insurmountable. They’re not looking for a single source of truth, but clarity about how different truths relate. The opportunity now is alignment: shared definitions, greater transparency and interoperable systems that make measurement more actionable and trustworthy.”

“To drive real performance, we need more than just innovation–we need accountability,” said Ashwini Karandikar, 4As executive vice president of media, technology, and data. “​Agencies and their advertiser clients are pushing for a future-ready infrastructure where definitions are unified and methodologies are transparent. By pairing next-gen tools like AI with stronger industry guardrails, we ensure that every dollar is measurable, every assumption is verifiable, and every campaign is optimized against a reconciled, holistic view of the market.”

Based on a quantitative survey of 197 senior marketers and 16 in-depth executive interviews, the research explores how advertisers prioritize seven major measurement domains – Media Delivery, Media Verification, Audience Delivery, Attention Metrics, Brand Impact, Media Performance and Attribution Metrics – where confidence breaks down, and how expectations will evolve over time. Across all categories, 39% of advertisers ranked Media Performance (encompassing metrics such as CTR, CPA and ROAS) as the single most important domain today.

However, the study shows a growing focus on other measurement categories as well as performance. Advertisers expect Verification, Attention, Audience Delivery, and Brand Impact to grow significantly in importance over the next three to five years, even as confidence in these areas remains uneven due to limited standardization and lack of interoperability.

Cross-platform measurement and transparency around methodologies are seen as the two largest barriers to effective measurement over the next three to five years, with 43% of advertisers rating each as a major or severe barrier. A full 84% of advertisers foresee the impact of AI on measurement as the most consequential, far more than other potential technology advancements, speaking to the desire for faster interpretation, supplements to panel-based research and relief from the burden of reconciling disparate data sources.

Further, the study outlines four priorities to strengthen advertiser confidence:

• Stronger governance through shared definitions and standards
• Greater transparency into methodologies and modeling assumptions
• Innovation paired with guardrails that support trust and usability
• Investment in interoperable, future-ready infrastructure

To download an executive summary, visit: The Paradox of Plenty: Advertisers’ Perspectives on the State of Measurement. The full report, with the entire set of data survey results, will be made available exclusively to members of CIMM and 4As.

NEW YORK—The Media Ratings Council, which accredits audience measurement services, has issued a statement flagging potential problems with Nielsen’s National Big Data + Panel Television measurement service. The group also described how it is working with Nielsen to resolve those problems, which resulted in notable declines in viewing among people aged 25-54 in the first half of 2025.

During the first half of 2025, MRC said that it became aware, through various sources, including its own ongoing audit-related work, “of seemingly unusual changes in measurement results from the Service; for example, decreases in audiences for certain demographics (e.g., total day impressions for persons 25-54 years old declined by more than 10% on average during the first half of 2025, as compared to the first half of 2024).”

It also flagged “issues with representation levels in Nielsen’s panel (household viewing technology as well as demographic characteristics), as well as changes in the general variability associated with reported audience estimates and between audience estimates originating from Panel only vs. Big Data + Panel measurements.”

Nielsen’s National Big Data + Panel Television measurement service has been accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC) since January 2025 and remains accredited.

The MRC noted that the service involves a "complex set of measurement processes that rely on several data sources such as Return Path Data from set-top boxes, Automated Content Recognition Data from certain smart television brands, Streaming Data (both from the Nielsen National audience measurement panel for general streaming activity and integrations with 3rd party sources for certain live sports events) and Nielsen’s National television audience measurement panel distributed across the United States."

The Nielsen service also relies on certain machine learning algorithms and techniques (i.e., “modeling”) to derive audience estimates, including certain procedures to predict demographic information associated with non-panel sourced tuning information.

To maintain that accreditation, the MRC said that it had “identified four priority areas that we believed required Nielsen’s actions to help address the issues: 1) Implementation of an independent media-related universe estimate source, 2) Changes to Nielsen’s modeling processes to increase demographic assignment accuracy, 3) Changes to Nielsen’s weighting process to help simplify the overall process and reduce standard error levels in reporting, and 4) Improving underrepresented demographic segments in Nielsen’s panel (e.g., Hispanic, Spanish Dominant).”

“In September 2025, MRC informed Nielsen that improvements on these four matters was necessary to maintain accreditation of the Service,” the group said.

Since that time, Nielsen has conducted and shared research as well as proposed several solutions to address these areas, the MRC reported.

In February 2026, Nielsen implemented the ARF DASH study as a source of media-related universe estimates. It should also be noted that the ARF DASH study was granted MRC accreditation in early 2026 after successfully completing a separate MRC audit process.

The MRC also said that in terms of underrepresented demographic segments, Nielsen made notable progress in quarters three and four 2025 and into January 2026, and has expressed a commitment to continue focusing on balancing demographic representation since we believe further work is needed in this area.

In addition, the MRC reported that adjustments to Nielsen’s modeling and weighting processes are currently planned for implementation in April 2026.

“At present, MRC members are awaiting impact data for these changes on a combined basis to better understand the nature of the changes as well as to verify expected reduction in bias and in statistical variability,” the group said. “Impact data is currently being delivered by Nielsen in phases to enable our evaluation and provide notice of impacts to the marketplace.”

The MRC also stressed that “we understand and we regret that these changes will be disruptive to business processes of the marketplace; we are encouraged that Nielsen is actively working to address the priority areas for improvement that have arisen in their Big Data + Panel measurement. We will continue to evaluate the estimated impacts of these planned methodological changes, with urgency, as they are important to Nielsen’s current accreditation of the commerce significant National service, which continues to be under evaluation at this time. Should the expected timing be modified or delayed, MRC will determine next steps on how to proceed.”

NEW YORK—Nielsen has introduced more than 200 new advanced audiences segments in a move designed to help marketers move beyond traditional audience demos. The new segments are available immediately via the company’s cross-media planning and measurement solution, Nielsen ONE.

The new segments, which draw on Nielsen’s consumer insights solutions arm, Scarborough, cover many of today’s key advertising categories, such as automotive, retail, lifestyle, political and even media habits (consumers of local news, heavy radio listeners, heavy social media users, and more).

Nielsen reported that this expansion is a strategic response to the industry’s urgent demand for addressability and interoperability at scale.

Pairing Scarborough’s national consumer dataset with Nielsen ONE’s cross-media insights creates a marketing intelligence platform that gives clients everything they need to understand their audience in one place. Streamlining this process helps facilitate a more efficient ad marketplace by ensuring that media spend is optimized from the initial strategy through to final impact, significantly reducing waste and driving higher ROI.

Looking forward, Nielsen also said that it plans to build on that momentum by launching hundreds of additional advanced audiences segments in the coming months to further expand on this existing library.

“For decades, Scarborough has been the gold standard for deep consumer and market insights. We’ve combined Scarborough’s trusted consumer data with Nielsen ONE to meet the demands of a modern, outcomes-driven industry. This integration gives marketers the specific insights they need to reach the right people and accurately measure their campaign’s success,” said Ellie Pryor, vice president, global audiences & identity, Nielsen. “The end result is a solution that provides marketers with actionable insights to inform their campaign planning and measurement.”

NEW YORK—The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) has announced strategic priorities for 2026 that aim to reinforce its commitment to advancing improvements, best practices, innovations and collaboration across the media and advertising industries.

To help carry out that agenda, CIMM also announced that Dana McGraw (Disney) and Ben Hovaness (OMD) have joined Kate Sirkin (Epsilon) and Larry Allen (Comcast Advertising) on CIMM’s Board of Directors, providing strategic direction to drive innovation and industry collaboration.

“CIMM’s members are navigating a more complex and fast-moving marketplace, with dramatic changes underway,” said Jon Watts, managing director, CIMM. “In 2026, CIMM is focused on delivering real, actionable change, with a focus on critical innovations in three interrelated priority areas: effectiveness, attribution and outcomes; CTV, streaming and programmatic; and the transformational application of AI to media planning, buying and optimization. Our goal is to support the development of practical, scalable approaches that build confidence, transparency and trust.”

Hovaness added: “AI will speed up planning and optimization, but only if the inputs are credible. CIMM’s work to strengthen measurement and governance will help ensure automation increases client value, not just activity. Better measurement is the foundation for better performance."

Following extensive consultation with its Steering Committee and members, CIMM reported that its 2026 program will focus on three critical areas:

• 1. Unlocking the full potential of CTV, streaming and programmatic. CIMM will focus on the structural, technical and governance changes required to support an increasingly impressions-led TV and video marketplace, including the convergence of linear and streaming measurement, the operationalization of impressions across CTV and addressable environments, and the implications for trading, currency comparability, and cross-platform planning. The Coalition will also explore the evolving role of programmatic infrastructure in enabling scalable, transparent, and trusted TV and video transactions.
• 2. The revolution in advertising effectiveness, attribution and outcomes measurement. As the industry shifts from audience delivery to business outcomes, CIMM will examine how attribution, outcomes-based measurement, and Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) are reshaping planning, optimization and valuation of TV and video. Work will focus on improving methodological rigor, comparability, and transparency; understanding the relationship between platform-level attribution and independent measurement; and defining best practices for integrating exposure, attention, and outcomes signals into modern MMM and decisioning frameworks.
• 3. The transformation of advertising measurement, planning, buying and optimization in the age of AI: CIMM will explore how AI-driven measurement, synthetic data, identity resolution, forecasting, optimization, and decision automation are reshaping TV and video advertising. This work will assess opportunities and risks – including model transparency, bias, explainability, and governance – with the goal of helping the industry harness AI in ways that enhance trust, accountability, and effectiveness. The role and implications of AI-powered creative will also be a critical focus.

During the year, CIMM also said that it will announce specific studies centered around its key focus areas and other initiatives that address a range of critical industry priorities.

CIMM will also be publishing a range of new studies undertaken in 2025, including papers addressing:

• Advertiser and agency perspectives on evolving measurement and currency needs.
• A live, in-market proof-of-concept assessment of open-standards CTV watermarking.
• Evaluating quality signals, including attention, as indicators of effectiveness.
• A diagnostic analysis of the transformation of MMM in the age of AI and big data.
• An empirical study on the effectiveness of contextual advertising in CTV.
• A buyer’s guide to identity resolution solutions.
• The state of kids’ media measurement and the case for industry action.
• Innovations in sports measurement and sponsorship evaluation.
• Addressing fraud in the U.S. CTV and streaming ad market.
• Strengthening the institutional foundations of the U.S. measurement marketplace.

CIMM enters 2026 following a year of strong growth and engagement across membership, research and events. In 2025, the Coalition welcomed 20 new members, including Adelaide, Affinity Solutions, Amazon Ads, Amazon Web Services, Antenna, Centro TV, Deloitte, HyphaMetrics, Kargo, Keynes Digital, LoopMe, Mutinex, Relo Metrics, RTL Ad Alliance, Strategus, Tenetic, TiVo, Trajectory, Versant and Vevo. Amazon Ads and Versant also joined CIMM’s Steering Committee.

CIMM’s Working Groups – knowledge communities that help identify research priorities and develop projects – also added two new chairs: Josh Chasin (KnotSimpler) for Ad Measurement & Effectiveness and Melva Goffney Benoit (The Marian Dupree Group) for Content Measurement & Analytics.

In addition, following a competitive review of applications from early-stage innovators aligned with CIMM’s mission, the Coalition recently announced its 2026 Startup Program members.

CIMM events planned for 2026 include: CIMM East (March 31), Cannes (June), CIMM Summit NYC (September 22-23), CIMM West/ARF OTT (October 27-28) and CIMM London (December 7), and its Innovation Showcase series, with one on identity resolution taking place February 18.

To learn more about CIMM, its mission and initiatives, visit: https://cimm-us.org/.

In ye olde days of traditional television, when U.S. TV viewing options were limited to ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, Nielsen’s paper diaries were sufficient for tracking viewership and providing useful audience data to advertisers.

Today, everything has changed. “The television landscape has experienced a massive amount of change over the past several years,” said David Levy, CEO of OpenAP, an advanced advertising company jointly owned by the Big Four commercial broadcast networks and focused on video, TV and cross-platform audience targeting and measurement. “Viewership has bifurcated across screens, with CTV [connected TV] and streaming growing to become as large a viewership channel as linear. Because of that, legacy measurement models fell short of accurately measuring audiences.”

To address these changes, audience measurement firms such as Nielsen, OpenAP and Samba TV are using new models to capture accurate, actionable viewing data. These models are meant to provide advertisers with information that matters as much today as it did in the past: Who is watching what, and what are the best ways to reach them with commercials?

The Hybrid Model
Because today’s viewers watch video in so many different ways, the logical way to measure them accurately is across all of their viewing platforms. This is known as the “hybrid model” of TV audience measurement.

“Hybrid measurement models leverage large-scale device-level datasets (big data) such as Return Path Data (RPD) and Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to augment the granularity of analyses supported and the accuracy of measurement solutions,” said Sean Breedlove, OpenAP’s vice president of measurement and analytics. “Panel data sources are used to calibrate big datasets, adjusting for biases, filling known gaps in coverage and estimating person-level viewership to ensure that the resultant measurement is representative of the market.”

Nielsen is using the hybrid model today. “Changing consumer habits have led to fragmentation,” said a Nielsen spokesperson. “It’s widely agreed upon that hybrid measurement, like our Big Data + Panel measurement, is the way forward to unlock the most accurate view of what people are watching across platforms. Our Big Data + Panel measurement is based on over 45 million households and 75 million devices (from Comcast, Dish, DirecTV, Roku and Vizio) and validated by our person-level panel of over 100,000 real people and 42,000 homes.”

The Role of AI
Thanks to their ability to process and analyze massive data, AI and machine learning (ML) are playing a crucial role in enhancing the accuracy and speed of TV viewership measurement. The technologies are also adding new kinds of measurement to the mix.

For example, “Samba AI enables the TV itself to detect scenes, objects, brands, interactions and even sentiment of what’s happening onscreen without needing to send data to the cloud,” said Alyson Sprague, Samba TV’s vice president of measurement products. “The result is real-time contextual analysis that powers brand-safe advertising, AI-generated metadata and content-aware experiences, while reinforcing user privacy and ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted viewing experience,” she said.

Nielsen agrees. “AI can help the industry analyze and uncover new patterns and trends and ways of thinking about data,” the spokesperson said. “Nielsen processes petabytes of data and machine learning helps us carry out methodological research, accuracy checks and corrections at a scale never before possible. But AI models are only as good as the data that is used to train them and publishers and marketers should be diligent that the underlying data is a trusted truth set that accounts for gaps, biases and inaccuracies.”

Getting More From Audience Measurement
Modern TV audience measurement is moving beyond the traditional metrics of reach and frequency to focus on the concepts of “advanced audiences” and “outcomes.” As used by Nielsen, advanced audiences provide demographics-based insights into viewers’ purchasing history and their intent to buy specific products; their lifestyle behaviors, attitudes and interests; their economic status (which influences purchasing decisions); and their race/ethnicity identifications.

“The rise in advanced audiences is driven by the need to reach relevant audiences beyond just age and gender,” said the Nielsen spokesperson. “Our advanced audiences are cross-platform and backed by our Big Data + Panel measurement. On the outcomes front, we launched our Outcomes Marketplace, which is aimed at providing a combined view of reach, brand lift and sales lift to help better inform media strategies and show the full-funnel impact of ad campaigns.

“Our initial partner Realeyes gives clients an understanding of creative attention and emotive response to ads, and we will be announcing other major partners soon,” the spokesperson added.

Tangible Results and the Future of Measurement
Taken as a whole, the new audience measurement approaches described above are helping advertisers cope with the explosion of video viewing sources and styles, while providing them with additional options for precisely targeting ads to the most receptive consumers.

“These new approaches enable advertisers and content producers to monitor both the scale of viewership and audience resonance of their ad creatives and content on a more real-time basis, allowing them to make ad creative and media content optimization decisions more fluidly based on in-market consumer response,” Breedlove said. In the future, “TV measurement will become increasingly audience-based, rather than relying on age/gender demographics that have traditionally been leveraged for linear TV transactions.”

“What matters across the board are the outcomes brands are trying to achieve,” Samba TV’s Sprague said. This is where a flexible, innovative approach to TV audience measurement matters, because it empowers advertisers to deliver better results to their sponsors. A case in point: “In a recent study with Amazon Ads, campaigns that combined traditional TV with Amazon Ads drove a 2 times lift in awareness and a 5.4 times lift in purchase intent,” she said. “That is the kind of outcome-focused impact we are working to deliver across industries.”

BELLEVUE, Wash.—Julie Van Ullen has joined cross-platform TV ad measurement company iSpot as president and chief revenue officer.

Van Ullen, who will report to iSpot founder and CEO Sean Muller, will be responsible for a range of functions critical to organizational growth, the company said, including sales, marketing and customer success; driving media partnerships and business development; and leading client-focused data science teams.

She comes from e-commerce firm Rakuten Rewards, where she was chief revenue officer.

“Julie is a dynamic leader with a proven track record of building high-growth teams and fostering trusted relationships with customers across the media and advertising ecosystem,” Muller said. “She has a clear vision for how iSpot’s measurement and data assets will power performance and efficiency in the next generation of advertising—and the kind of passion and energy required to drive success.”

While at Rakuten Rewards, Van Ullen’s guidance helped drive 135% revenue growth for the loyalty firm, iSpot said. She also played a key role in the successful rollout of new advertising solutions, the integration of advanced measurement and data capabilities and the scaling of strategic platforms with brands, agencies and platforms, the company said.

Prior to Rakuten, she held buy- and sell-side leadership positions at ad-buying platforms FreeWheel and OpenX.

“I’m beyond thrilled to join this talented team and to work with America’s leading brands, publishers and platforms,” Van Ullen said. “iSpot ushered in a new era of speed, transparency and performance for the TV marketplace and is such a critical decisioning flywheel for marketers across the entire advertising journey—from creative to audience measurement to outcomes—as a way to more directly drive ROI. The modern marketer needs actionable clarity of media performance and iSpot is a crucial ‘must have’ in that regard.”

Van Ullen has also been an influential voice in the ad industry, iSpot said, most notably as a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s board of directors, where she played a vital role in shaping the standards for advertising measurement and efficacy.

NEW YORK—Warner Bros. Discovery and Nielsen have signed a new, long-term, multi-year deal that covers measurement for all Warner Bros. Discovery platforms across linear and streaming.

As part of the new deal, Warner Bros. Discovery will expand its use of Nielsen’s services. In 2026 it will start using new services that tap into Nielsen’s Advanced Audience capabilities. Warner Bros. Discovery will continue to use Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel as currency for this Upfront and beyond.

“As our industry leading reports show, Warner Bros. Discovery is one of the top media companies in the world, consistently delivering hits for fans across every platform,” said Karthik Rao, Nielsen CEO. “Nielsen is the only company that can deliver measurement for every way that fans watch their shows, across all platforms. From streaming to linear and live to on demand, we give Warner Bros. Discovery the data they need to grow their business. We’re thrilled to extend our partnership so that we can deliver accurate data for Warner Bros. Discovery and our mutual advertising clients.”

“At WBD, our priority is to provide clients the most reliable tools and actionable insights to better reach their audiences and maximize their campaigns’ effectiveness,” said David Porter, head of ad sales data, insights, and research at Warner Bros. Discovery. “As the industry continues to accelerate currency innovation and optionality across the marketplace, Nielsen’s robust measurement capabilities will deliver our partners smarter data and solutions to better capture performance and viewership across all screens, further optimizing the impact of their ad spend and inventory.”

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Three months after Nielsen announced that, for the first time in history, more U.S. viewers watched TV via streaming than via traditional broadcast, Roku confirmed the trend is continuing, announcing that U.S. viewers spent more time streaming content on Roku-powered devices than watching traditional broadcast television for the third consecutive month.

According to Nielsen data, streaming on Roku-powered devices accounted for 21.4% of all TV viewing time in the U.S. during July, surpassing broadcast TV’s 18.4% share. This continues a trend from May and June, when streaming on the Roku platform also outpaced broadcast. Roku’s share of TV viewing has grown steadily throughout 2025—up 14% year-over-year—reflecting not just a shift in technology, but how audiences discover and engage with the entertainment that shapes today’s culture, Roku claimed.

Roku remains the leading destination for streaming overall, by usage and TV unit sales. The Roku OS powers streaming on smart TVs and devices in over half of all internet-enabled households in the U.S.

“In broadcast’s heyday, TV guides directed us to ‘must-see’ television and the pop cultural moments we shared,” said Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media. “Today, the streaming platform is the guide, and the moments shaping culture are happening on Roku. We’re the ‘lead-in’ to TV for millions of viewers’ and partners’ journeys, connecting them to the content, live events, and experiences that define the streaming era.”

NEW YORK—The advertising sales business of Charter Communications, Spectrum Reach, has announced the full-market rollout of its newest planning tool, Audience Reach Optimizer (ARO).

The ARO advertising planning tool is designed to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of advertisers' campaigns, delivering their TV ads to their intended audience, the sales unit reported.

ARO leverages Spectrum Reach’s unique data insights in a privacy-focused way to simplify the process for advertisers to target audiences more efficiently at the household level. The new planning tool identifies new opportunities for multiscreen engagement across traditional TV and streaming platforms, maximizing campaign impact and audience engagement.

"We are delivering solutions that make it easier for advertisers in today’s competitive advertising landscape," said Jason Brown, senior vice president, chief revenue officer for Spectrum Reach. “By providing unique, data-driven insights on campaign reach and frequency through tools like ARO, we empower advertisers to fine-tune their targeting strategies, optimize media spend and maximize audience engagement with information they cannot access elsewhere. Ultimately, this insight drives better business outcomes for our clients.”

Spectrum Reach began piloting ARO in key markets in 2024 and has since run over 5,600 reports providing advertisers with full access to performance data. ARO sources its broadcast ad log data from Spectrum Reach partner MediaRadar, now including the data and capabilities of Vivvix, and its cable ad log data from Spectrum’s campaign orders.

By combining its unique broadcast and cable ad log data sources at scale, the company said that ARO gives Spectrum Reach’s clients a broader view of their campaigns, helping them to identify more targeted opportunities to connect with potential customers.

For example, Spectrum Reach found in a sample that more than 80% of advertisers' quarterly broadcast-only campaigns underdelivered to households in the overall market, whereas shifting their spend to cable increased audience engagement.

That was the case for Matter Brothers, a high-end furniture store chain in Tampa, Florida, the company added. By using ARO, Matter learned that their intended customers were spending more than 70% of their time watching cable networks as opposed to local broadcast channels, where they had been heavily investing in advertising. With this insight, Matter adjusted their TV spending, leading to sales that exceeded the furniture industry benchmark by more than 10%.

“When we first started working with Spectrum Reach, they identified inefficiencies in our ad campaigns,” said Kim Dominguez, marketing director for Matter Brothers. “With ARO, we found that more than 60% of our local broadcast investment was targeting only 8% of sales. To address this, we shifted our ad budget from local broadcast to cable to better connect with our intended audience. We are already seeing the benefits through improved results and increased audience engagement.”

Spectrum Reach also reported that ARO includes several features that differentiate it from other ad planning tools on the market. For example, it uses well-defined methodologies and transparent definitions, allowing advertisers to see exactly how their ads are performing and make better decisions. ARO also provides exclusive data that no other planning tool offers by tracking ad views on both traditional TV and the Spectrum TV App. This gives advertisers the most relevant and valuable information for their campaigns.

More information about Spectrum Reach is available at www.spectrumreach.com.

Former Fox Sports executive Dan Donnelly has joined audience measurement firm VideoAmp as head of sports strategy, tasked with accelerating growth for its sports practice and enhancing its measurement efforts within the industry.

Donnelly had been senior vice president of ad sales strategy at Fox Sports, where he oversaw strategic efforts influencing multibillion dollars in ad revenue, VideoAmp said. He also held leadership roles in the U.S. Sports and Entertainment division of Publicis Media and at Starcom Mediavest Group. He has negotiated multiple high-profile media partnerships with major sports leagues, securing multiyear TV deals for Anheuser-Busch with the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, NASCAR, the NCAA, the PGA Tour, the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, VideoAmp said.

“After so many years in media and marketing, working with brands, media owners, leagues, and agencies, I'm excited to join VideoAmp where technology is at the heart of smarter planning, measurement, and optimization,” Donnelly said. “It’s about leveraging data to drive more efficient and effective strategies, all with the ultimate goal of tracking and enhancing brand and business outcomes. Being part of a team that’s pushing the boundaries of how we measure success in advertising is truly inspiring, and I’m eager to contribute to this transformative journey.”

At VideoAmp, Donnelly will focus on addressing the need for accurate cross-platform measurement in sports media, strengthening and expanding the company’s partnership portfolio and accelerating technological capabilities to meet the rising demand for precision in sports advertising, the company said.

“VideoAmp could not be more excited to welcome Dan on board to lead our Sports practice,” Executive Vice President of Revenue Bryan Goski said. “As a 20-year industry veteran with deep expertise with agencies, brands, and publishers in the Sports vertical, I have no doubt that he will add immense value to our team and help us realize our mission to provide the highest quality of measurement to our partners.”

VideoAmp said its advanced out-of-home measurement solution uses Big Data culled from TV sets and smartphones to provide actionable insights. Donnelly will work to strengthen and expand a VideoAmp partner portfolio that includes Netflix and WWE for “Monday Night Raw” and CBS Sports, the company said.

RESTON, Va.—Comscore has named Frank Friedman as its new chief data and analytics officer and head of measurement.

Friedman, who has a career spanning agency, research, publishing, and client leadership, will oversee the company’s data governance, drive currency adoption efforts, and develop tailored measurement playbooks for a variety of customers, Comscore said.

Friedman comes to Comscore from station group E.W. Scripps Co., where he pushed for new approaches to measurement and negotiated its first agreement with Comscore. He advocated for the consolidation of data organization into a single holistic group for both National and Local divisions, and worked at Publicis Groupe on improving efficiencies in planning and buying, Comscore said.

“I am delighted to welcome Frank Friedman to the executive team at Comscore as we navigate the next frontier of measurement for our customers and the industry more broadly,” Comscore CEO Jon Carpenter said. “Frank has consistently been at the forefront of challenging convention and implementing disciplined strategies to drive change, and we are excited to bring his perspective to our organization during this stage of our transformation.”

Committed to advancing data analytics, rigorous measurement governance, and fostering collaboration, Friedman has also held pivotal board and committee positions with industry bodies and key organizations including the Media Rating Council (MRC), Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and Video Advertising Bureau (VAB).

“I’ve been a cheerleader for change from every side of the ecosystem to help solve the industry’s toughest challenges,” Friedman said. “In previous roles, I leveraged the power of data to disrupt and drive growth, now in joining Comscore, I’m thrilled to shape the next era of what is possible in omnichannel measurement at such a pivotal moment for the ecosystem.”

RESTON, Va.—Comscore has announced that it has renewed and expanded its measurement deal with Gray Media.

As part of the multiyear agreement, Comscore will continue as a key local measurement currency provider for Gray and provide additional advanced demographics as well as more-precise audience insights across screens.

“We appreciate Comscore’s continued advancements in audience measurement and are pleased to roll out these solutions across more of our stations,” Gray Media senior managing vice president and chief revenue officer Matt Jaquint said.

With the renewed agreement, Gray will adopt Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR), Comscore’s cross-platform measurement solution, starting in 2025. CCR will enable Gray to deliver comprehensive cross-platform insights with in-flight monitoring, ensuring advertisers achieve maximum campaign efficiency, Comscore said.

Additionally, Gray Media has added more TV stations, including its broadcast regional sports networks, for measurement by Comscore.

It will now also use Comscore’s Advanced Audience solutions, including County, Automotive, Political data and Plan Metrix, which enables marketers to plan against very specific audiences based on behavior.

These capabilities will provide Gray’s advertisers with precise insights and deduplicated measurement across screens in such key metrics as reach, frequency, incrementality and co-viewing.

“This expanded partnership represents a significant step forward in the measurement space as we continue to work alongside Gray Media to provide data-driven insights that fuel their continued growth and success,” Comscore chief commercial officer Steve Bagdasarian said. “We take pride in Gray’s confidence in our advanced cross-platform audience measurement solutions and are pleased to expand this important relationship.”

TV ad measurement company iSpot has announced that it has received industry certification from the U.S. Joint Industry Committee (JIC) for its measurement capabilities and methodologies covering critical areas of the cross-platform TV advertising industry.

In addition to receiving certification for overall transactability, iSpot’s latest measurement methodology, iSpot Data Connect, has been deemed ready for scalable transactions in all currency classifications that were evaluated by the JIC, iSpot reported. This includes Total Households and Audiences across both Average Commercial Minute, Exact Spot Ad measurement and Personified Demos – which is how 90% of the TV marketplace is traded on today.

In announcing the certification, iSpot said that to date it is the only measurement provider to receive a nod from the JIC as reaching the baseline requirements needed to be able to be used for transactions across all three classifications – demonstrating through the evaluation that iSpot data is stable enough for forecasting, planning, estimating and posting purposes.

Late last year, iSpot also received MRC accreditation for its verification of national TV ad airings advertising — a foundation for cross-platform ad-based currencies – and maintained its conditional certification by the JIC. Together, this recognition paves the way for a new currency to emerge that seamlessly bridges TV and streaming.

iSpot’s overall certification marks an important vote of confidence in the progress and innovation made in iSpot’s products and solutions, the company said. The JIC’s Measurement Subcommittee awarded iSpot this critical industry certification following nearly 300 rigorous data tests of its data. The certification is valid for 2 years

“The JIC and its members have established an important place in today’s media ecosystem for not only understanding and evaluating with efficacy, efficiency and rigor the value and accuracy of measurement methodologies and data today, but are setting a great example of how the industry should be thinking about the measurement quality of tomorrow,” said Sean Muller, CEO, iSpot.TV. “We’re thrilled and honored to receive this certification and look forward to continuing to set an example for the entire industry of what measurement could be like when it’s done right.”

LOS ANGELES & BELLEVUE, Wash.—The TV measurement company iSpot has announced an integration with TikTok that will provide brands with a deeper understanding of how the audience reach of TikTok compares to American Linear TV viewers.

The solution is now widely available to marketers via iSpot’s Unified Measurement Platform, which verifies and measures TV advertising across hundreds of streaming platforms, apps, services, and traditional linear networks, iSpot reported. 

In announcing the integration, iSpot also released some new data from the solution. It said that on average, 58% of TikTok impressions reached a unique audience of viewers who were unexposed to the TV portion of the campaign—demonstrating the efficiency of TikTok campaigns in driving new audiences to advertisers’ linear TV campaigns.

“In the dynamic video landscape, brands need to extend their reach beyond traditional channels. TikTok’s commitment to providing diverse measurement tools enables advertisers to understand and leverage cross-media engagement, driving meaningful results.” said Jorge Ruiz, global head of marketing science, TikTok

Specifically, through this partnership and integration, TikTok advertisers can now leverage iSpot’s Unified Measurement solution to quantify the ad impressions delivered to incremental households not reached on linear TV or streaming sources and obtain person-level audience estimates to account for mobile viewing behaviors.

iSpot said the integration gives advertisers the ability to:

• Understand their TikTok campaign performance with Unified Measurement standard KPIs
• Determine the reach and value of TikTok through brand-level reporting
• Optimize media plans and buys across CTV and linear with incremental reach of TikTok ads

“Marketers and brands that aren’t considering TikTok as integral to their cross-platform marketing campaigns are clearly missing out on an opportunity to extend their reach and drive results,” said Stu Schwartzapfel, executive vice president of media partnerships at iSpot.tv. “We’re thrilled TikTok leaned into our leading Unified Measurement to uncover, understand and ultimately capitalize on consumers who are not reached by linear TV.”

NEW YORK—MobileFuse has announced an agreement with cross-platform measurement company iSpot.tv that will make iSpot.tv MobileFuse's preferred measurement solution. 

The use of iSpot’s Unified Measurement platform ensures MobileFuse clients can accurately measure the effectiveness of CTV and OLV campaigns at scale, the two companies said. 

The partnership will also help MobileFuse account for additional CTV audiences that brands can't access when running a linear-only strategy. With the partnership brands can use the iSpot and MobileFuse platforms to bridge the gap between linear and CTV, with iSpot measuring linear TV impressions for 30,000+ brands using their proprietary ad catalog, airing data and industry-leading Smart TV panel, the companies said. 

This data is combined with MobileFuse's CTV solutions, giving advertisers the full picture of linear and CTV overlap, expressed as incremental reach.

With access to iSpot's Unified Measurement dashboard, MobileFuse expands its optimization and reporting capabilities to include publisher, audience, and frequency adjustments, the companies said. 

"Over the last year, we focused on expanding our CTV offerings and reporting capabilities. We're committed to providing critical tools that deliver our clients and partners a competitive edge," said Ken Harlan, founder and CEO of MobileFuse. "After vetting multiple linear and CTV measurement partners, we found that iSpot.tv perfectly aligns with our expectations. The platform ensures our clients have access to unified insights that drive results."

In May, MobileFuse aired campaigns from a variety of verticals, including Retail, QSR, Travel, and Pharma. An analysis performed by iSpot found that over 67% of MobileFuse's reach for a medium-sized brand was incremental to linear - and that number rose to 85% for a smaller brand. MobileFuse frequently exceeds iSpot's Unified Measurement Benchmarks for the Percent Incremental Reach metric, which shows the percent of MobileFuse's total reach that is delivered above and beyond linear and speaks to the uniqueness of MobileFuse's audience.

"Accurately measuring the value of CTV advertising is crucial as audiences have migrated from linear TV to streaming," said Dan Lowenberg, VP, media partnerships, iSpot. "We're excited to work with MobileFuse in order to help them showcase their evolving solutions and provide their clients the tools they need to win in this ultra competitive environment."

These measurement capabilities are available to all MobileFuse clients interested in running CTV campaigns in addition to their linear buys. For more information, visit https://mobilefuse.com/. 

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced that LiveRamp is now interoperable with Nielsen to power Big Data + Panel advanced audience planning and measurement in Nielsen ONE.

Mike Bregman, chief activation officer for Havas Media Network North America praised the integration by explaining that "LiveRamp and Nielsen's new integration allows Havas Media to holistically plan on, buy, activate and measure custom-built advanced audiences as part of our proprietary Converged product suite to better serve our clients. This integrated solution will enable us to leverage first- and third-party data and we're excited to introduce it across our portfolio."

The deal seamlessly connects first and third-party data sources to Nielsen via LiveRamp, which enables audiences to be planned and measured across platforms by leveraging Nielsen ONE Ads, Nielsen's planning suite, and Nielsen's Data Driven Linear solutions. 

It also means that clients can create and leverage advanced audiences across the Nielsen ecosystem for end-to-end planning and measurement across screens at both the household and person-based level.

"We've seen the industry demand grow across linear and digital for highly targeted audiences powered by big data," said Stefan Maris, chief partnerships officer, Nielsen. "Our integration with LiveRamp enables seamless connectivity of both first and third-party data to plan and measure advanced audiences at scale using Big Data + Panel."

LiveRamp's integration furthers Nielsen's interoperability within the marketplace, enhancing long standing integrations with publishers, platforms, data providers, and agency holding companies, Nielsen said. 

"Our integration with Nielsen delivers a more holistic and detailed understanding of audiences across screens that empowers both brands and agencies to improve activation, and publishers to enhance the value of their inventory," said Vihan Sharma, chief revenue officer, LiveRamp. "All parties gain access to deep insights that fuel a powerful flywheel around planning and measurement."

NEW YORK—Comcast’sAudienceXpress has announced a new series of data collaborations with iSpot that the companies said will provide the industry with new data sets for TV ad measurement, enhance performance TV marketing solutions and provide better attribution reporting.  

As part of that effort, the two companies are teaming up to evaluate how iSpot’s syndicated national TV ratings can best be incorporated into the AudienceXpress platform.

“We are excited to be teaming up with iSpot,” said Katy Loria, chief revenue officer of AudienceXpress and FreeWheel, a global technology platform for the television advertising industry that is also part of Comcast Advertising. “Today’s TV ad landscape is incredibly fragmented, putting consumers in control. So much so that they watch content when, where and how they want it. As a trusted business partner to our clients, it’s our responsibility to make sure their ad dollars work smarter and that the ads they create reach their target audiences. As such, we’ve partnered with iSpot to help further drive accountability and reliability in this space.”

The effort comes at a time when new and established measurement and currency providers are introducing innovative technologies and solutions aimed at delivering more reliable and accurate means of TV ad measurement as viewing habits continue to shift, the companies said. 

In addition to the agreement to evaluate iSpot’s national TV ratings, AudienceXpress said it will continue to work with DRMetrix and 605, both recent iSpot acquisitions, to pioneer enhanced industry reporting and attribution solutions.

As part of its agreement with DRMetrix, AudienceXpress has access to direct response marketplace tools, insights and resources to help better understand today’s media and marketing landscape as well as to aid in prospecting new advertiser and agency clients.

AudienceXpress will also closely collaborate with iSpot’s 605 in order to find ways to deliver attribution studies in a more cost-effective and streamlined way. This agreement allows AudienceXpress to show marketers across various verticals the mid- and lower-funnel effectiveness of its portfolio of cross-screen media solutions.

“We’re proud to be working with AudienceXpress,” said Stuart Schwartzapfel, executive vide president of media partnerships, iSpot. “AudienceXpress is known for delivering market-leading, cross-screen media solutions globally, and we hope that by working with them, we can help further push the boundaries on new innovations and possibilities in the measurement and currency space.”

NEW YORK—The ad tech platform Nexxen has announced an agreement with PeerLogix that will provide users of its TV intelligence platform with exclusive aggregated streaming viewership data from platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Disney Plus. 

PeerLogix captures and catalogs global consumer viewership data from various leading CTV platforms in real-time. Integrated with traditional television viewership data (to which Nexxen also has exclusive access), these comprehensive segments will strengthen Nexxen’s TV Intelligence solution, which already includes Set-Top Box (“STB”), Automatic Content Recognition (“ACR”) and cross-screen panel data.  

The integration of PeerLogix's data into our TV Intelligence solution enhances our capacity to deliver unparalleled value to our clients through real-time, premium insights," said Jessica La Rosa, vice president, TV partnerships and strategy at Nexxen. "We're thrilled to be expanding our already holistic and representative dataset with cutting edge streaming viewership data, allowing brands and advertisers to elevate the effectiveness of their campaigns in the fast-evolving CTV landscape." 

“Our partnership with Nexxen represents a significant advancement in the evolution of advertising to streaming audiences, introducing a more holistic approach in today's complex media landscape by uniting PeerLogix's robust viewership data with Nexxen's market-leading platform," said William Gorfein, chief executive officer at PeerLogix. "This strategic partnership is a pivotal step forward which offers clients unparalleled insights and enhanced precision in the targeting of streaming audiences, bridging the gap between linear and streaming channels via the Nexxen platform to engage diverse television audiences.”

NEW BERN, N.C.—Wheatstone recently received certification of its core streaming software from Nielsen for inserting the ratings firm’s Portable People Meter (PPM) encoded watermark, and now that capability is available to broadcasters from their streams and in the cloud.

Wheatstone’s Layers Stream, a full suite of software for streaming from an on-premise service or a cloud data center, now supports the watermark as does the company’s Streamblade and Wheatstream AoIP streaming appliances, the company said.

Whether streamed from a Wheatstone appliance, an on-prem server or in an AWS cloud data center streams can be counted separately or tallied with on-air listenership to attract advertising buys.

“In the case of Wheatstone, we’re integrating the encoding right there in processing software rather than running it through a hardware encoder after the fact,” said Nielsen product manager Eric Kmetz. "It's a much better way to operationalize it." 

Having the Nielsen encoder certified as part of the Wheatstone processing chain gives broadcasters confidence that their station will be measured by Nielsen, said Wheatstone senior product development engineer Jeff Keith.

Wheatstone and Nielsen engineering teams completed the certification process in January after extensive testing for quality and error detection of both audio content and the watermark being streamed through Wheatstone processing software, the company said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced that it has signed a multi-year extension of its agreement with Nexstar Media Group to provide Nexstar with local and national TV measurement services.

The agreement covers Nexstar’s media businesses, including The CW Network, NewsNation, Antenna TV, and 200  owned or partner television stations in 116 local markets across the country. Under the terms of  the agreement, Nielsen will continue to be a preferred Nexstar provider of currency-grade TV  audience data. 

Nexstar has expressed dissatisfaction with existing measurement options and last summer said it was looking for a “next-generation audience partner." 

Earlier this month, Nexstar had announced a major measurement deal with Comscore. 

The new agreement will, however, keep Nielsen as its preferred provider of currency-grade TV  audience data. 

Under the new deal, Nexstar will continue to leverage a comprehensive suite of Nielsen’s Local, National & Digital  solutions including Over the Top (OTT) measurement, cross-media measurement via Nielsen  ONE Ads, Digital Content Ratings (DCR), Digital in TV Ratings (DTVR), Scarborough, Rhiza  and Grabix - which all provide important audience insights.  

In reaching this agreement, Nexstar, as well as all  Nielsen customers, have access to Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement approach. Big  Data + Panel combines the scale of millions of homes with Nielsen’s representative people powered panels to provide more accurate and data-driven measurement the industry can trust  to accurately represent their audience.  

“Nexstar is a valued, long-standing customer, and we’re proud to continue to serve as one of its  preferred providers of audience data and ad measurement,” said Amilcar Perez, chief revenue  officer, Nielsen. “Nielsen’s unique mix of unrivaled data science expertise paired with our  comprehensive measurement sets us apart from other providers. We remain committed to  bringing the industry and our customers data they can trade on with confidence.” 

“We are pleased to extend our relationship with Nielsen and are excited about the potential for  Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement solution to more accurately measure all the places  where consumers engage with Nexstar’s valuable content – over the air, via cable and satellite,  over-the-top, online and out-of-home” said Michael Strober, Nexstar’s chief revenue officer.

NEW YORK—Nielsen and Fox have announced they’ve renewed their audience measurement deal. The multi-year agreement includes measurement of Fox networks across broadcast (Fox), cable (FS1, FS2, Fox Deportes, Big Ten Network, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network) and free streaming (Fox Weather) and includes Nielsen One Ads measurement across all Fox properties. 

Also with this agreement, Fox will continue to license Nielsen's suite of planning and audience measurement solutions to help advertisers and agencies reach audiences at scale for critical live news and sports programming.

Nielsen also continues to be a measurement provider for digital ad measurement on Fox's streaming platform, Tubi.

"Fox is at the forefront of providing millions of viewers valuable news, sports and entertainment content, and we value our long-standing relationship with Fox," said Amilcar Perez, chief revenue officer at Nielsen. "As we continue to focus on innovating our measurement to meet our clients' needs, we are proud that clients like Fox choose Nielsen to provide the audience measurement data across digital and linear properties it needs to bring value to its advertiser partners."

RESTON, Va.—Comscore has announced a multi-year agreement with Nexstar Media Group to provide cross-platform audience measurement for Nexstar’s local TV, broadcast, network, and digital businesses.

Comscore has provided local market measurement to Nexstar since 2010 and the new deal marks an expansion of that relationship.

The agreement at a time when Nielsen has been under increasing pressure to improve its measurement offerings.  Nexstar announced last summer that it was looking for a “next-generation audience partner” and that it has hired a new vice president of measurement innovation to lead the search. 

Last July, Nexstar said it has issued an open Request for Proposals "seeking a next-generation audience measurement partner capable of providing data that accurately reflects the scale and power of the company’s national and local media  businesses." 

“Comscore is proud to expand its relationship with Nexstar Media Group to empower Nexstar’s advertisers to unlock optimal reach across key markets and platforms. Nexstar will offer unmatched value to advertisers in a critical election year and beyond, by seamlessly validating its true audience reach with market level precision down to the specific region across linear and digital,” said Comscore CEO Jon Carpenter. “Our partnership demonstrates our ability to eliminate costly ‘make goods’ as Nexstar leverages the strengths of Comscore’s cross-platform solutions to ensure ad dollars are optimized across non-linear mediums to complete incremental reach to what is achieved by linear television.”

“Comscore’s ability to provide us with total audience measurement metrics across our local television stations and websites, NewsNation, The CW Network, and The Hill, enables our cross-platform sales team to leverage our unique scale and reach to customize bespoke advertising and marketing solutions for our clients,” said Michael Biard, Nexstar’s president and chief operating officer.  “We look forward to offering our advertisers deeper insight into who is watching and interacting with our programming and when they are doing so, enabling them to focus on the audiences they want to reach.”

Financial terms of the agreement were not announced.

NEW YORK—New data from Nielsen’s The Gauge shows that overall TV viewing increased in October of 2023 and that broadcasters increased their share of overall viewing to 24.6%, the highest share they’ve seen since January of 2023, while cable and streaming both lost audience share. 

Cable’s audience share was the lowest since Nielsen launched The Gauge, the media measurement company's monthly snapshot of total broadcast, cable and streaming consumption that occurs via television. Streaming lost audience share for the third consecutive month. 

Overall usage increased by 2% compared with September, according to Nielsen's October 2023 report of The Gauge. The increase in overall TV usage in October was boosted by the broadcast category, which was the only viewing category within The Gauge to exhibit monthly growth in viewing volume (+9.4%) and share (+1.7 pts.).

The growth marked the third consecutive month of growth for broadcasters and boosted the broadcast audience share to 24.6% of total TV usage in October and its largest share in The Gauge since January 2023 (24.9%). 

October is normally a flagship month for broadcast viewing with the start of a new season. This year, however, with the Hollywood strikes that stopped the creation of new scripted programs, the category's 9.4% monthly viewing increase was almost entirely attributable to sports programming, Nielsen said. 

The new report also noted that the broadcast sports genre was up again in October (+15%) after recording a massive 360% monthly increase in September. 

Sports viewing, which was boosted most notably by NFL games and the MLB World Series, made up nearly 30% of all broadcast viewership. The drama genre followed with 18% of the category's viewership. 

By comparison, in October 2022, when there weren’t strikes, the sports genre made up 25% of the broadcast category, while the drama genre led with nearly 27%. Also on a year-over-year basis, broadcast viewership was down by 5.6%, and the category has lost 1.4 share points.

Meanwhile, cable viewership was up slightly in October (+0.9%), benefiting from increases in sports (+19%) and news (17%) viewing. News led in viewership across all cable genres and made up nearly 22% of the category's total viewing. Despite these double-digit gains and cable's nearly 1% monthly growth, it wasn't enough to keep pace with the total TV trend—the category lost 0.3 share points in October to finish at 29.5% of total TV usage, cable's smallest share to date.

Trending in the opposite direction of broadcast, streaming gave back share for a third consecutive month despite usage remaining mostly flat with September (-0.6%). While streaming recorded a loss of 0.9 share points in October, finishing the month with 36.6% of total TV usage, roughly 0.5 pts. were lost due to a methodological update*.

Streaming usage was largely stable across platforms this month. Some notable streaming highlights include:

• Netflix retained eight of October's top 10 streaming titles, despite the streamer declining 5.6% in usage and losing 0.6 share points vs. September.
• Suits (on Netflix and Peacock) was the top streaming title for a fourth straight month, even with viewership down a third from September.
• The other two top streaming titles, Bluey and Elemental, belonged to Disney+, whose viewership was up 1.5% to keep its share of TV at 1.9%.
• Amazon Prime Video retained a 3.6% share of TV (a personal best reached in September) and usage was up 1%. The streamer continued to see peaks in usage on Thursdays, benefitting from NFL Thursday Night Football.
• Linear (live TV) streaming via MVPD (multichannel video programming distributors) and vMVPD (virtual multichannel video programming distributors) apps represented 6.4% of total television usage in October. Linear streaming is included in the appropriate broadcast or cable category, and is not included in the streaming category.

Nielsen noted that this iteration of The Gauge includes a methodology update that more accurately differentiates viewing to Hulu's SVOD and vMVPD (Hulu Live) components. This update does not reflect a change in consumption, rather, it reflects how this viewing is being credited within The Gauge. The net impact is roughly a half (0.5) share point, which affects both Hulu SVOD and total streaming.

NEW YORK—Comscore has announced it is adding social metrics in its Media Metrix Multi-Platform suite, which provides a deduplicated view of audiences across desktop, mobile, and social to enable publishers and brands to measure their comprehensive total digital population.

The company is billing the move as a first in the digital/social measurement space and said the new metrics and tools allows publishers and brands to deduplicate social audiences and see who is unique to a particular platform. This allows brands to see which users are actually replicated in social media platforms and will help them make their ad campaigns to be more efficient and effective.

“Comscore’s methodology streamlines data with precision and uncovers interconnections across platforms, enabling us to deliver unique reach metrics that now include social,” said Greg Dale, COO at Comscore. “It’s a solution only made achievable by the massive scale of Comscore’s proprietary digital panel. Our Social Incremental methodology, which is inherently privacy-first, allows publishers with significant social presence to capture and monetize the full value of their deduplicated audiences across their entire footprint.”

In announcing the new metrics and features, Comscore also provided statements from several users applauding the development. 

“Buzzfeed has built significant scale both on our own properties and offsite across all major social platforms…and Comscore’s Social Incremental reporting will allow us to demonstrate how we can deliver strong value to our partners both on our own sites and now also through our huge social reach,” said Jörn Rose, director of platform growth analytics at BuzzFeed.

“iHeart is excited to add social media fans into our Comscore audience, because these are some of our most vital and fastest growing audiences,” added Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s Digital Audio Group.  “Also, notably, the scale of this social media audience is totally unique to iHeartMedia in the audio space: We are the only audio company in the country with this massive, engaged audience across all social platforms – driving home the fact that we are a companionship company like none other.”

NEW YORK—Nielsen and LG Ad Solutions have signed an agreement that creates the largest automatic content recognition (ACR) data footprint in the U.S. 

With this arrangement LG Ad Solutions joins previously announced Comcast, Vizio, Roku, Dish and DirecTV deals that increase Nielsen's big data footprint. The agreement also expands Nielsen's CTV campaign coverage via direct integrations that leverage big data. Nielsen's other direct integrations include Netflix, Sling, Samsung, Vizio, Amazon, Roku and Hulu. 

Such agreements are important because they provide advertisers with additional data that allows them to make smarter decisions around linear campaign spend and optimization.

As part of the agreement, LG Ad Solutions will provide Nielsen with its ACR data for use in Nielsen’s National TV measurement service, giving Nielsen the largest ACR data footprint in the industry. LG Ad Solutions is providing Nielsen with ACR data for both linear and CTV measurement, providing greater stability for Nielsen National TV audience estimates. Nielsen is also receiving LG ACR data at the household level, the companies explained.        

As a result of the deal, advertisers activating campaigns on LG Smart TVs will have the opportunity to receive 'Always On' streaming measurement and big data from LG Ad Solutions via Nielsen ONE Ads starting in the First Quarter of 2024. Nielsen will measure all ad impressions, inclusive of co-viewing, on advertisers' campaigns, giving advertisers a broader view of performance metrics to fuel cross-platform campaigns.

In addition to the big data expansion, the deal provides CTV data for Nielsen's Ad Intel solution, enabling an increased level of measurement and visibility into competitive advertising spend. This allows Nielsen to gain advertising intelligence capabilities on streaming platforms in addition to its existing linear capabilities, providing advertisers and agencies more valuable insight into their ad performance on the platforms, the companies explained. 

"Nielsen is on a path to evolve measurement through use of big data sets, and our deal with LG Ad Solutions is a landmark moment in our journey," said Ameneh Atai, general manager of audience measurement at Nielsen. "The continued acquisition of ACR data combined with Nielsen's representative panel allows Nielsen to provide the most accurate modern audience measurement of linear ads as well as increase coverage of CTV."

"Agencies and brands working with LG Ad Solutions can now seamlessly benefit from Nielsen ONE Ads measurement data and essential metrics, including co-viewing across millions of smart TVs and connected devices," said Alistair Sutcliffe, head of product at LG Ad Solutions. "This collaboration with Nielsen exemplifies our dedication to industry interoperability and underscores LG Ad Solutions' strategy of fostering a forward-looking data approach with our strategic partners, prioritizing both consumers and advertisers for the overall benefit of the industry."

As part of the launch of AWS’ Media and Entertainment (M&E) solution area to help broadcasters and advertisers improve the monetization of content, Comscore's data sets have been integrated into the AWS solution, a development that will provide clients easier access to data and analytics, according to Joseph Delfino vice president of strategy  and business development at Comscore. 

This new initiative, announced earlier in September, will enable customers to simplify and modernize their advertising stacks, increase revenue across viewing platforms, and build direct, more personalized relationships with audiences, Delfino said in a blog post. 

The effort is designed to help advertisers deal with ongoing market challenges that include cookie deprecation, privacy regulations, signal loss, media fragmentation, and lack of data interoperability are significant obstacles for businesses to overcome. 

To help with that Comscore was recently part of the launch of AWS’ Media and Entertainment (M&E) solution area focused on monetization. 

“By leveraging AWS and its new solution, Comscore will be embedded within a technology platform that is native to many client workflows,” Delfino wrote. “This will further enable frictionless access to Comscore’s rich cross-platform dataset and provide clients with the flexibility to collaborate with Comscore and their first-party datasets in the future. The AWS M&E Monetization solution area is one of many ways in which Comscore is working with partners in the media ecosystem to frictionlessly deliver data.”

As part of a demo of the solution at IBC, Delfino said that Comscore showcased this data collaboration and the drag-and-drop UI with a no-code interface on AWS Clean Rooms. This solution lets customers access Comscore datasets, without leaving the AWS Console or writing a single line of code.

Comscore’s integration with AWS gives customers easy access to datasets in a privacy-compliant clean room setting, he added. “With this solution, Comscore is building upon several important strategic pillars in its cross-platform approach, giving publishers and broadcasters the ability to: capture, curate, and create more audience value, drive new revenue streams, and unify planning, optimization, and measurement,” he wrote. 

“We continue to build a technology ecosystem that meets customers’ needs for frictionless data distribution,” Delfino reported. “This partnership will play a significant role in Comscore’s goal to deliver cross-platform solutions to the industry.”

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced that Karthik Rao has been named CEO and that David Kenny, who has served as CEO since 2018, will assume the role of executive chairman.  

“Nielsen has been my home for most of my career, and I could not be more excited for this new opportunity,” said Rao. “Providing our client partners, the ad industry, and content creators of all types, the most accurate information possible is our singular goal.  Nielsen invented measurement a century ago. In that time, the way audiences consume content has fundamentally shifted many times over, and we are committed to continuing to partner with our customers to lead that change. I am fortunate to work alongside the best in the business, around the world, as we address unprecedented times of transition in our business. Together with our talented employees, I look forward to positioning Nielsen for the next century and beyond.”

“This is an exciting day for Nielsen and for me,” David Kenny added. “I have been fortunate to lead this company through some extraordinary times in the past five years, working alongside Karthik for much of it. As I transition to my new role and my operating responsibilities come to an end, I hand over leadership to someone with extensive experience in knowing what Nielsen does best, backed by the skills and understanding to position the company for a vibrant future. He has my complete support and I wish him, and everyone at Nielsen, nothing but tremendous success.”

Since early 2023, Rao has served as CEO of Nielsen’s Audience Measurement business, responsible for driving and evolving Nielsen’s audience measurement in the midst of unprecedented disruption and transition. His primary focus has been on enabling a currency across all media distribution and consumption models globally. 

Prior to being named CEO of the audience measurement business, Rao served as Nielsen’s chief operating officer. Before that he was the CEO of Nielsen Portfolio, leading the fully independent division comprising Nielsen Entertainment, Nielsen Gracenote, Nielsen Brandbank and the Nielsen Telecom businesses across all global markets.  

Nielsen is owned by Elliott Investment Management L.P. (“Elliott”), and Brookfield Business Partners L.P., together with institutional partners (collectively “Brookfield”).    

“We have spent the past five years engaged with Nielsen, and even more closely since the acquisition nearly a year ago,” said David Kerko, head of private equity at Elliott. “We have seen great progress already, and we want to thank David for all he has done to contribute to that success. Karthik is now the right leader for Nielsen, which is well positioned to evolve with and support the media ecosystem as it undergoes a period of dramatic change. Karthik’s expansive industry experience, deep client relationships, and proven track record make him ideally suited to manage this evolution and make Nielsen’s value stronger than ever.”

IRVING, Texas—Amid widespread industry frustration with the state of cross-platform audience measurement, Nexstar Media Group has announced that it is searching for a “next-generation audience partner” and that it has hired a new vice president of measurement innovation to lead the search. 

Nexstar said it has issued an open Request for Proposals "seeking a next-generation audience measurement partner capable of providing data that accurately reflects the scale and power of the company’s national and local media  businesses." 

“Nexstar has an unprecedented collection of media assets, including the largest local broadcast group in  the United States, a national cable news network, a free over-the-air television network, and a variety of  digital media properties, and we need deeper, richer data about the audiences interacting with them,”  said Michael Strober, Nexstar’s chief revenue officer. “We believe current methods of audience  measurement inadequately reflect our national reach and the effectiveness of the local activation we  deliver to advertisers and marketers. We need to accelerate the pace of innovation in cross-platform measurement not just with national content, but with the content generated in every one of our local  markets. We also must ensure that the best data is operational across the company.” 

To improve the current systems that inadequately measure cross platform audiences, Nexstar also reported that it recently appointed Hanna Gryncwajg as vice president of measurement innovation to lead  this effort and oversee the RFP process. 

The company has also been actively engaging with new  measurement partners, working earlier this year with VideoAmp and iSpot to deliver linear and streaming  audience data generated across its media platforms. 

“Our work with several new measurement partners has demonstrated the benefit of fresh thinking and  the need for a much more expansive set of measurement capabilities across our entire footprint," said Gryncwajg. "We are looking for innovations and roadmaps that can deliver game-changing improvements  to help us maximize the effectiveness of Nexstar’s portfolio for advertisers across the whole funnel – from  awareness to conversion and purchase. We need to measure what matters most, and we need to do that  across all of our endpoints with speed and precision."  

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced the launch of its Local Streaming Insights Quarterly Solution. The new report provides metrics on TV app usage and streaming to the glass, for over 20 major streaming apps at the local market level. 

The quarterly reports are available for the top 56 local markets and include insights on subscription streaming services such as Netflix, ad-supported streaming services such as Pluto TV, and MVPD and vMVPD apps such as DirecTV Stream and other leading providers.

The launch marks the first time that Nielsen clients will have access to syndicated reports with streaming insights that are specific to the local audiences in which they are targeting.

“We are delighted to provide a new and impactful solution to support our clients' understanding of the rapidly evolving viewing landscape,” said Catherine Herkovic, executive vice president and managing director, Nielsen Local. “We are committed to working alongside our clients to help them deliver on their business objectives and access valuable local audiences at a deeper level.”

Nielsen's Local TV measurement includes persons-level demographics for traditional cable, satellite, broadband only and over-the-air viewers. The combination of Nielsen's Local TV panels plus return path data allows Nielsen’s customers to measure local media buys. 

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced that it has renewed a multi-year agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group for Nielsen Local and National audience measurement services.

As part of the agreement, Sinclair will continue to utilize Nielsen audience measurement services for 197 local television stations and one regional cable channel across 84 local markets, as well as its national networks, including the Tennis Channel, TBD, Charge! Comet, and national unwired network.

Sinclair will also continue to leverage a range of Nielsen tools to complement the Local and National audience measurement and drive their business goals, including Nielsen Ad Intel, Nielsen Scarborough, and Nielsen TV/MRI Fusion, the companies reported. 

"We are delighted to continue as Sinclair's long standing provider of audience measurement and delivering insights that help power its strategic growth initiatives across local and national TV, regional sports and out-of-home services." said Catherine Herkovic, executive vice president and managing director, Audio and Local TV at Nielsen. "As the media landscape continues to become more complex and media owners continue to diversify their platforms, Nielsen remains committed to delivering accurate, equitable, and unbiased measurement across all forms of media."

NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced an expansion of its audience measurement relationship with Netflix that includes a multi-year agreement to provide linear and streaming audience data across the U.S., Mexico and Poland. 

In the U.S., Netflix will subscribe to Nielsen's National TV measurement data and Streaming Platform Ratings. In Mexico and Poland, Netflix will subscribe to cross-platform audience insights which are derived from streaming panels in each respective market.

The expanded measurement deal comes at a time when Netflix is looking to grow its advertising business. It will also help Netflix to better understand and measure audience behavior and viewing preferences to make informed business decisions about programming, the companies said. 

With insights from across Nielsen's measurement services, Netflix will now have a holistic view of cross-media consumption, the companies said. 

"We're honored to continue working with Netflix to provide them with the insights they need to understand their audience as media consumption evolves," said Kim Gilberti, senior vice president product management at Nielsen. "As we move closer to providing comparable and deduplicated metrics across screens and platforms with Nielsen ONE, this agreement with Netflix is another great example of why Nielsen is well positioned to lead the audience measurement movement now and in the future."

"The biggest shift in entertainment continues to be from linear TV to streaming and Nielsen's Gauge shows where viewers spend their time - and how their consumption patterns are changing," said Pablo Perez De Rosso, Netflix Vice President, Strategy, Planning & Analysis. "This information is essential for the industry and we're excited to continue to work with Nielsen in Mexico and Poland."

NEW YORK—In an important step forward in the industry’s efforts to improve measurement, the Media Rating Council (MRC) has issued a draft version of its Outcomes and Data Quality Standards. 

The announcement opens a 60-day public comment period on the Standards. 

The standards are intended to both improve the quality of data and standardize the measurement of Outcomes resulting from advertising exposure.

MRC’s Outcomes Standards initiative was publicly announced in June 2020, with preliminary guidance issued in March of 2021.

Since the release of this preliminary guidance, the MRC has been working with the Outcomes Advisory Group (a large group of MRC members, practitioners and interested parties including ANA, 4A’s, IAB and ACA) to produce a Public Comment Draft of the Standards.

The Standards address various Outcomes measures and approaches, including attribution and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), Market Mix Modeling (MMM) and experiments, as well as the underlying data quality associated with these methods.

Key provisions include:

• Guidance and requirements related to incorporating viewability, invalid traffic (IVT) filtration and audience measures into media and ad exposure attributed to Outcomes, building on previous MRC Standards;
• Definitions and requirements for “funnel” metrics from interaction, engagement, direct outcomes and efficiency metrics;
• Requirements for attribution approaches including MTA, such as decay curves, regression approaches, determining weight or value and lookback windows;
• Requirements for MMM approaches, such as coverage, spend data, modeling parameters and external/environmental factors;
• Requirements related to use of Test and Control approaches or experiments as validation, in combination or hybrid approaches and on a standalone basis;
• Detailed guidance and requirements for underlying data quality, including identification and key privacy considerations.

MRC noted that it will consider the comments it receives during the 60-day public comment period, which ends August 7th.  Shortly after that date, MRC will produce a proposed final version of the Standards for review by the working group.  

It is expected that the final version of the Standards will be issued publicly before the end of Q3 2022. 

The draft standard can be accessed at www.mediaratingcouncil.org. 

CHICAGO, Ill.—Several companies and networks owned by Byron Allen have filed a civil suit against Nielsen alleging that its “outdated and unreliable” ratings significantly undercounted audiences, particularly for smaller networks, and that Nielsen's inaccurate audience measurement cost media companies “billions of dollars.” 

“Based on Nielsen’s false representations, half-truths, and concealment, Nielsen received millions in fees per year to provide fundamentally unreliable and flawed services,” from networks owned by Allen, the suit alleges. 

The Civil lawsuit was filed by Byron Allen’s CF Entertainment, Inc., Entertainment Studios Networks, Inc., Weather Group, LLC, and Weather Group Television, LLC. in Circuit Court Of Cook County, Illinois, County Department, Law Division.

The lawsuit argues that “Nielsen’s panel system [for audience measurement] may have worked decades ago when there were a handful of networks that could be viewed only over the air on a television set. With changes in the television industry, viewers now have hundreds of channels to choose from. They can watch video by subscribing with distributors, such as satellite or cable providers, or stream over the Internet through services and apps that can be viewed on Smart TVs, computers, cell phones and tablets.”

This audience fragmentation makes Nielsen’s ratings for smaller networks particularly unreliable, the suit said, citing widespread industry criticism of Nielsen’s ratings during the pandemic by the MRC, the VAB and a number of media companies. 

Moreover Nielsen’s position as a “monopoly” provider of industry-wide currency for ad sales allowed it to delay reforms, the suit claims. 

“Nielsen has known about the problems for years but has not invested to make its ratings system reliable and up-to-date,” the suit said. 

“This monopoly position allowed Nielsen to dominate the market without developing new and improved ratings services to keep up with the rapidly changing market for  television networks and programming,” the suit alleges. 

“Nielsen knew that, based on the limitations of its panel system and the increased  fragmentation of television viewership, it could not reliably rate smaller networks,” the suit said.

Nielsen “concealed this highly material fact from Entertainment Studios” in “2017 when Nielsen caused Entertainment Studios to pay Nielsen to rate the networks,” owned by Allen’s Entertainment Studios. “Nielsen also made false promises and told half-truths to obtain millions in fees to rate The Weather Channel,” which is also owned by Allen. 

“Plaintiffs are not alone,” the suit claimed. “Many other media companies have been led astray and have paid millions of dollars to Nielsen in exchange for unreliable and flawed services. It is estimated that Nielsen caused these media companies billions of dollars in damages.”

The suit also claims that “Nielsen’s inability to reliably rate Entertainment Studios’ networks was well known within Nielsen. On information and belief, Nielsen employs teams of statisticians who keep track internally of statistical data that can affect the accuracy and reliability of Nielsen’s data. Through these internal reviews, Nielsen knew that its ratings services were unreliable, especially for networks like those owned by Entertainment Studios. Nielsen knew that,  when distribution for a network is limited in the number of subscribers, the sample errors in  Nielsen’s reports increase dramatically making the service fundamentally unreliable.”

The suit did not list a specific amount for damages. 

NEW YORK—Nielsen is working to transform its cross-media strategy by unifying measurement across linear TV, advanced TV and digital video solutions. To help with that effort, the company announced the appointment of Scott Brown to the role of general manager, Audience Measurement.

Brown is taking on the new role having most recently served as the CTO for Nielsen’s measurement products, leading the implementation of the cloud-base platform Nielsen’s current audience measurement product suite is now on.

In his role as general manager, Brown will oversee Nielsen’s efforts to rework its digital measurement methodology to create “a flexible, independent platform that can quickly adapt to evolving privacy and policy changes,” Nielsen said. He is also taking the lead on the effort to incorporate addressable advertising into TV measurement.

“Consumers are watching premium video in a fundamentally different way today than they were even five years ago,” said Eric Bosco, chief product officer for NielsenMedia. “We’re bringing together the ability to effectively plan, optimize and measure through the full funnel so that marketers can monetize this opportunity to the fullest extent. Scott will play a critical role in bringing all of our measurement solutions together to ensure that we meet the evolving needs of the market.”

“Nielsen has historically measured media types and platforms independently,” said Brown. “However, as convergence across all media types continue, the industry will require a single methodology for a holistic view that captures how digital, connected TV and other platforms perform alongside linear TV. This is the holy grail.”

For more information, visit www.nielsen.com.  

WASHINGTON—Nielsen has seen the comments by some broadcasters to the FCC regarding its methodology for determining whether a TV stations is “significantly viewed,” and has responded by saying that it remains the standard bearer for such a classification.

According to Nielsen’s comments to the FCC, Gray TV is one of the commenters that has questioned its ability to conduct significantly viewed measurements.

Determining that a station is “significantly viewed” in an adjacent market allows a MVPD serving that market to carry the station, even if it duplicates in-market syndicated or network programming, something that would otherwise be prohibited by the network nonduplication and syndicated exclusivity rules.

In a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on March 31, the FCC suggested that actual signal strength of a station may be a better metric for determining the “significantly viewed” designation than audience/viewership data. The NPRM sought comments on whether Nielsen, or another methodology, should decide if a station is significantly viewed, noting that the current metric is 50 years old and it is unclear if the necessary over-the-air viewership data is still available.

PLUS: Ad Researcher Disputes FCC's Signal Strength Market Definition Idea

The complaints against Nielsen, according to the company’s comments, from Gray TV and others is that Nielsen has an overreliance on Return Path Data that may have compromised its ability to accurately measure OTA viewing and that significantly viewed surveys are too expensive.

Nielsen says, however, that it does not principally use Return Path Data for its measurements, but rather supplements Return Path Data with a sufficient number of code readers and other advanced technology to measure OTA viewing—a process it says it is alone in doing.

As far as price, Nielsen says that, barring a few exceptions, it has always been its policy to price significantly viewed surveys at cost. Moving forward, Nielsen says there will no longer be any exceptions to that policy.

Gray, in its comments, suggests that the Longley-Rice predictive model be used for future determining whether a station’s signal reaches or does not reach 25% of the community in question.

“From Nielsen’s perspective, the problem with the predictive model is the same as it has always been: it is not evidence of anyone watching anything,” the comments read. “A predictive model cannot tell anyone whether a station is viewed at all, let alone how much or how often it is viewed.”

Nielsen says that is succeeds only if it accurately measures TV audiences, which is why it has invested so many resources into improving its measurements, including those for significantly viewed determinations.

“There is, in other words, no problem here that needs to be solved,” Nielsen concludes.

To read the full comments, visit FCC’s ECFS. 

WASHINGTON—The Insights Association has come out strongly against an FCC proposal that would have local TV station markets be determined by signal strength measurements over the current system based on audience measurement.

The FCC has been looking into how to update how to determine if a TV station is “significantly viewed” in a given community outside of its local market so as to determine if it can be treated as a local station by cable and satellite providers. The FCC is seeking comment on whether audience measurement research for this has become “outdated or overly burdensome”—it was first adopted nearly 50 years ago, according to the FCC.

In comments filed by Insights Association, a nonprofit trade association for the marketing research and data analytics industry, measuring signal strength cannot compare to to scientific audience measurement “because it can’t tell the FCC where anyone actually watched the signal, even if the signal strength theoretically captures where such a signal might be capable of being viewed.”

The association says that because consumers have a choice in what and when they watch something on TV, the fact that a signal reaches a certain area does not mean that it is significantly viewed in that area.

“Audience measurement research quantifies and tracks those choices for an accurate reading of consumer behavior and sentiment,” Insights Association’s comments read. “The signal strength approach, by contrast, completely disregards consumer choice.”

Insights Association’s full comments are available online. 

IRVING, Texas—The cost for advertising during popular TV shows on Nexstar stations will no longer be based on traditional TV ratings, but rather will be determined on a cost-per-impression model, Nexstar Media Group announced.

Having developed a new method with Comscore that provides audience measurement metrics across Nexstar’s broadcast, digital, mobile and streaming video platforms, advertisers will be able to use these impressions to garner more qualitative data about the audience, more accurately reflect the total number of people watching and are more comparable to metrics used by non-broadcast platforms.

Among the viewer details that this new system is able to reveal, per Nexstar, are household incomes, shopping preferences and brand loyalties. Advertisers can utilize this data to target their spending for maximum impact, including reaching customers as they prepare to make a purchase, Nexstar says.

“This transition is an important step in modernizing the way buyers and sellers conduct business to better reflect the trends in video-consumption and to ensure that all viewing audiences are being accurately counted,” said Steve Walsh, executive vice president of local services at Comscore.

“Our sales force will be able to talk to all advertisers—big or small, national or local—in an informed, fact-based manner about maximizing the reach and effectiveness of their spending across every available media channel and every viewer will be counted, no matter where or when they watch,” said Tim Busch, president of Nexstar Broadcasting. “In addition, advertisers will be able to universally target their customers regardless of the distribution platform and monitor the results through unduplicated audience measurement.”

CLEVELAND—The ATSC 3.0 broadcast transmission standard earned a high grade after the successful transmission of a Nielsen audience measurement watermark from the NAB/Consumer Technology Association ATSC 3.0 test station in Cleveland. The NAB conducted the test last week as part of the collaboration between broadcasters and manufacturers to prepare for the Next Gen TV standard.

The Tribune Media-owned WJW station in Cleveland is the “living laboratory” to test ATSC 3.0 features, equipment and technologies. This most recent test saw the installation and transmission of the Nielsen watermarks, which are inaudible signals in a program’s audio to help identify the program for audience measurement purposes.

Catherine Herkovic, executive vice president and managing director for Local Television, believes that the successful transmission of the Nielsen watermarks will enable measurements of Next Gen TV’s impact with audiences.

NAB Executive Vice President and CTO Sam Matheny said the test marked another step forward toward the deployment and adoption of Next Gen TV and thanked Nielsen for its work on the project.

NAB plans to offer many demonstrations around the ATSC 3.0 standard during the 2019 NAB Show in Las Vegas.

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see ourATSC3 silo.