These days, I sort of put the Nielsen Company into the same recesses of my brain that I put a restaurant that at one time was one of favorite places to break bread. You know, at a time when I was a valued customer of theirs and when I had far greater financial resources to break said bread a bit more frequently than a few times a year. I found the end product to be appetizing, the people involved in the presentation to be earnest and engaging and the value proposition to be acceptable. But that was then and this is now.
As regular readers of these musings should know, I haven’t been all that thrilled with the posturing and shenanigans that seem to be all the more frequent with the management team that’s been in place since the last time the company went private. Long-promised rollouts and updates to interfaces and methodologies that have aged about as well as the clientele at my one-time fave eatery went unaccredited and pushed back even as legitimate competitors emerhged. The ever-insightful Evan Shapiro devoted a decent chunk of yesterday morning’s MEDIA WAR AND PEACE newsletter to how the last five years and change–pretty much the entire streaming-first era–have played out. If you can divorce yourself from the fact that it revolves around an awful lot of stuff that is anything but sexy, it’s a fascinating read. If you happen to be someone who ultimately is impacted one way or another by all this, it’s actually frustrating with a capital F, which is the same initial of the word I’ve often exclaimed when I was dealing more directly with Nielsen.
As he is so want to do, Shapiro provided the necessary framing for exactly what and why such (over)reactions are provoked:
If you work in or follow the American television industry, you know that the entire business is held captive by two organizations: the measurement monopoly Nielsen, the only universally accepted measurement metric and advertising currency; and the Media Ratings Council (MRC), the lone “self-regulatory body,“ charged with overseeing Nielsen and anyone else who attempts to compete with TV’s measurement monolith…due to the television industry’s self-destructive addiction to the status quo, their inability to see past the edge of their own double-dealing boondoggles, and because of the MRC’s long-standing protective relationship with Nielsen, no other TV measurement platform can pry enough business out of TV’s smoke-filled back rooms to challenge the King and Courtesan.
Full disclosure: I still have good friends who are in Nielsen’s employ, and they are very quick to remind when they do get something right. So after being almost as eloquently exasperated as Shapiro on a couple of occasions the year before last, I was genuinely pleased with the progress they made in 2025, when they adopted and FINALLY published data that more accurately measured and enabled monetization of audiences everyone knew were actually out there somewhere but somehow never managed to show up in an official report. But with the new year came a few new wrinkles in the form of modifications that came from entities as seasoned as that damn restaurant’s special, known by punch-line adjectives like ARF, DASH and NORC. Shapiro provides a eye-rolling description of the latter two that is more than worth your time to peruse, assuming you can keep a straight face while considering that this what is defined as progress.
But a funny thing happened on the road to (r)evolution, and that’s where MEDIAPOST’s Joe Mandese takes over with his own exasperated take that was dropped late last week:
If you really want to understand the influence streamers now command over Nielsen decision-making, consider this: After delaying a recalibrated version of its monthly Gauge report from this week to next to let it get its act together, Nielsen late today confirmed it will actually delay it until September. Citing unnamed sources, the (Wall Street Journal) reported that the delayed February Gauge (covering January data) would have reported a 41.9% total day TV usage share for streaming vs. a 47.4% combined broadcast and cable share, almost exactly the opposite of what Nielsen’s January Gauge (covering December 2025 data) reported for the two viewing sources.
Even the most detached observers would allow for the reality check that February featured a compressed series of aberrative events like the Grammy Awards. the Super Bowl and the Milan-Cortina Olympics that every objective report from Nielsen had already confirmed had delivered atypically large audiences for old-school destinations like CBS and NBC. But even amidst those positive spins came parochial narratives from their corporations that the availability and accessibility of these events on their respective struggling streamers was what was they saw as most encouraging. And considering this is NewFronts Week. where those with the money will be deluged with presentations from platforms that are more than capable of demonstrating proof of performance without having to rely on a third-party arbiter that seems to be finding merely undesirable alter kockers, the timing of the reality check that Nielsen, ARF, DASH and NORC dropped onto this pyre couldn’t have been worse.
The few remaining entities that are linear-focused are understandably POd. My old FOX colleague Mike Mulvihill is once again not holding back
, and his newer comrade-in-arms Kym Frank supplied her own WTFs via LinkedIn yesterday:
In the words of Laura Martin at this week’s Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) event, “I’m calling shenanigans.” Clients were informed at 4PM on a Friday.
If DASH is good enough for the currency, it should be good enough for the Gauge. I will add – if the Big data + panel dataset is good enough for the currency, it should also be good enough for the Gauge, but that change was never made either.
But while we’re in the spirit of finger-pointing, let’s be reminded that there’s a new face of the Nielsen Company that’s been involved in this latest round of “shenangians”. Here’s how BARRETT MEDIA reported this coronation last November:
Nielsen has announced it has appointed Peter Naylor as its first-ever Chief Client Officer, a newly created position focusing on clients, advertisers, and publishers. Naylor comes to the company after previously working at Netflix, Hulu, and Snap, among other companies. At Netflix, he was the organization’s first-ever Vice President of Global Advertising Sales. He helmed similar sales executive roles at Hulu and the social media platform Snapchat.
Naylor was last directly involved with a linear-focused company more than a decade ago when he oversaw digital ad sales for NBCU at a time when such efforts were far less video-heavy and far more scattered. At each of his more recent stops he underdelivered the outsized expectations of his aggressive management teams, most notably at Netflix, which regularly dumps viewership data in perpetually evolving and confounding forms to obfuscate the fact that they still trail the majority of their competitors in ad-capable subscribers and impressions. There are many adjectives one could apply to someone with that CV–objective would most def not be at the top of such a list.
If this is who the Nielsen Company chose as their chief liaison at the very time they finally were moving into the 21st century, it more than supports the claims that are being expressed by the Video Advertising Bureau’s Sean Cunningham
, who more often than not comes off in a most quixotic manner, vainly fighting the windmills of Naylor’s fellow klatsch members. And also seems to justify Shapiro’s even more dark conclusion that he delivered as a coda to the rant he opted to deliver just as the decision-makers that ultimately determine who hits their budgets were convening for a jam-packed quarter of days filled with schmoozing and bullsh-t:
Consumers have changed how content is consumed – totally and forever. The people who buy and sell TV advertising must do the same and finally transform the way they measure it. Advertisers and platforms can and should agree to grade each other’s homework, with methodology that serves both sides and produces – wait for it – tangible results; or they should be prepared to continue to lose to those who do…By saying all of the above, I know that I am burning whatever bridges I had left to the measurement industrial complex. But those bridges only head in one direction: to the past. I say burn them all down.
Sounds like Shapiro won’t be hob-nobbing with Naylor and his increasingly desperate and knee-bending colleagues anytime soon. He’d still be more than welcome at the place I still occasionally frequent with a few fellow alter cockers. 
Until next time…