I’m not sure if I can sit through watching Saquon Barkley pull an Al Bundy this Sunday, but most likely a hundred million of you or so will, and guess whose numbers we’ll be quoting on Monday when the Super Bowl ratings come in - Nielsen’s.
Yeah, I realize the Super Bowl maybe isn’t a great example. Yet it’s Nielsen that told us that YouTube is becoming a dominant CTV player. It’s Nielsen that gave us data for NFL games on Netflix and Amazon. It’s Nielsen updating us on the Grammys numbers and whether the Matlock reboot is a hit or not.
More importantly, you may have seen the recent news that Nielsen is now fully accredited for its Nielsen One big data + panel hybrid product. Buyers are happy.
All that hype and VC money and would-be IPOs centered on alternative currencies, and yet the big incumbent (some would say monopoly) has shrugged off MRC accreditation losses and all sorts of shots at its methodology and slowness.
Wait, isn’t Paramount boycotting Nielsen, and working with the upstart VideoAmp? Just kidding. Nielsen and Paramount just cut a new four-year deal. That turned out to be the Mexican tariff of the media war, as Paramount really just wanted Nielsen to seal up the data border.
Here’s betting we aren’t about to hear much in the next few months about Disney suddenly switching over to Samba TV or AMC adopting Trade Desk+(not a real thing).
Sure, the Joint Industry Committee is still out there promising to approval of alternative currency methodologies. Is anyone waiting for their next move? Does anyone care?
“It does seem like it's fizzled,” said Jamie Power, SVP of Addressable TV at Disney, on my show last week.
It sure makes you wonder whether this was all just about pressuring Nielsen to up its game and maybe cut better deals than truly seek this multi-currency world. So Nielsen’s a winner, right?
Well, at the end of the day, it feels like a lot of this won’t matter as the TV business shifts toward a very different way of operating, transacting and evaluating its efficacy.
To that point, this week , I had David Levy, CEO of OpenAP on my podcast - and we talked about the state of CTV measurement and advanced ad targeting, and what he sees as a lack of understanding regarding the challenges the industry is facing (and the belief the because more TV is being streamed that its advertising will be ‘just like digital’).
“I think we've focused a lot on currency and on measurement over the past few years as if that was going to be the panacea for this industry,” he said. “I think the reality is that as more more viewing moves into streaming, you're changing the whole calculus of conversation.”
Levy noted that in the linear TV-centric world, metrics companies could focus on projecting audience behaviors from small samples. “In streaming, we have signal on 70, 80 % of the impressions….To me as we move more and more to streaming, the counting game of like how many households were reached. You know, I'm not sure that's that actually important for measurement companies to solve.
“I think what's much more important is how do we consistently resolve signal back to the right household and then open up measurement towards innovation further down the funnel.”
So to try and put this into a 2025 context:
Yes, Nielsen and some others are able to track the top shows in streaming. But to advertisers, that most likely doesn’t matter. Aside from live events (a big aside) you’re not going to buy ads that follow a show on every platform, and use that show’s audience as a proxy for your campaigns reach, right?
More likely, media buyers and brands are going to be able to figure out where their CTV ads ran via their ad servers - which should tell them they got 200 impressions on Tubi, and 800 impressions on Peacock, and so on.
Yes, sellers like a Disney or an Amazon will be able to tell brands how many people in their core target they reached across Disney or Amazon properties. As for getting that info across the CTV ecosystem - good luck. That is where TV is shaping up just like digital - in that going forward, the sellers (you might say the walled gardens) have a lot more intel than buyers
Of course, increasingly what really matters to brands is outcomes. That’s where TV is likely to struggle over time. Unless people start shopping from their TVs in droves, direct attribution is going to be tough. There’s a reason we don’t see a slew of TV attribution startups getting funding. It’s why you have the Instacarts and NBCUs of the world testing the use of retail media data offline, in an effort to connect the dots.
Ok, but isn’t CTV targeting improving by leaps and bounds? Understandably, you might think that streaming can facilitate all sorts of killer addressability given all these clean room deals and first party data integrations you hear about. Well, here’s Levy talking about what that’s like to actually implement that sort of stuff:
“So typically in streaming, you are taking a audience, let's say, of auto-intenders. That audience list is going to be reflected as a list of individuals, and then it'll probably be translated to a list of households that those individuals exist in. And then you're going to share that with all the different media companies that you want to target that audience against.”
”Well, the challenge is that what you don't really realize is that audience then goes through multiple different hops and translations before it actually ends up going into an ad server. And you don't necessarily have transparency or control over those hops. So what would happen in that process?”“If you have a list of households, you don't target necessarily on that list of households. You actually would target based off of a set of device IDs or IP addresses, and that would be associated with the household….Well, if each of the programmers do that [matching][ in a different way, then what you end up with is a different list of targeting information from the exact same ‘Auto Intender.’”
“You're going to have a lot of variation in the audience that you're actually targeting. And then when it gets to measurement, the same challenges are persistent.
Yeesh. So that doesn’t sound like much of a currency war win for anybody. It sounds like the kind of circumstances that would hold brand back from doing more targeting in CTV overall;
Plus, as we’ve been talking about, AI may or may not take over all this anyhow. While I’m not sure whether AI makes sense when trying to execute branding campaigns, regardless my guess is that an AI-led media buying future favors the tech companies with deep pockets, and more importantly, the volume of transactions and data to make such an AI smart enough to buy that way. That would seem to be great news for Amazon, Google, maybe a Netflix.
It could make third-party measurement irrelevant over time.
In the meantime, the TV incumbents may need to find ways to work together to both compete with the tech giants, and make CTV ad targeting more viable.
“The more we can all collaborate together, the larger we can kind of make this addressable footprint where we know a logged in consumer exists,” said Levy. “And so I think there's opportunities for everyone to collaborate and also continue to invest in their own [data platforms and tech]. It just needs to be interoperable.”
Ad Tech For The Mid Tail
As CTV advertising continues to accelerate, the ad tech ecosystem for CTV is quickly becoming established - mostly driven by a power grab among the biggest existing players.
Which makes it hard if you’re a mid-sized video producer. However, my partners over at ElementalTV have built a stack of tools geared not for the Netflixes and NBCUs of the world, but for the likes of the family friendly streamer frndly.
I talked to some of the execs from the company about the CTV mid tail at CES last month. Check it out: