Measurement Competitors Try to Snatch the...

This has led to wins leveraging some of the industry’s discontent against Nielsen.

For instance, Paramount turned to VideoAmp in late 2024 for its viewership reporting over a dispute with the cost of Nielsen’s services, and, during its January Golden Globes broadcast—one of VideoAmp’s first major public tests—VideoAmp found that the awards show reached an average of 10.1 million viewers. Nielsen would later report that the event reached an average of 9.3 million. 

Regarding the Golden Globes situation, a spokesperson from Nielsen said that numbers were issued so clients can get “a full view of the industry.”

“That’s one of the great benefits of working with Nielsen—you get a full analysis of TV viewership over multiple years,” the spokesperson added. “This information was sought out by the industry because we provide the most accurate and trusted measurement.”

While several publishers, including Paramount and NBCUniversal, claim to be measurement-agnostic, two buyers told ADWEEK that the consistency of Nielsen across the industry makes it a staple that’d be hard to supplant.

Liguori said that instead of displacing Nielsen as a currency, he wants VideoAmp to have a place in a multicurrency world, where it has already made strides. Over the last year, VideoAmp reported $3 billion in currency guarantees, an 880% year-over-year growth, the company said.

But even if the TV industry were to consistently transact on multiple currencies, the market often treats Nielsen’s numbers as the “truth set,” according to an exec from another Nielsen competitor.

Competitors have also complained that Nielsen prevents its data from being compared with other measurement providers, which solidifies Nielsen as the provider of that “truth set,” making it difficult to chip away at its dominance. 

“The industry has full transparency on our data and measurement—and they can replicate our measurement on our platforms, which they are trained to use,” a Nielsen spokesperson said in response.

Taking measure of the industry’s future

Despite complaints about the upheaval around Nielsen’s panel + big data offering, it doesn’t seem as if the TV industry is stepping away from it. 

Instead, they are trying to adapt to it.

Speaking to ADWEEK in May, John Halley, Paramount’s ad sales chief, said, “When the data sets change, there is some turbulence there that needs to be understood. That process is a net new for most advertisers, most agencies, and most publishers.”