Measurement Competitors Try to Snatch the Crown, But Nielsen Remains King for Now

As this year’s upfront season comes to a close, Nielsen remains the industry leader, but amid a messy measurement war, competitors aren’t backing down.

And why should they? Recently, measurement competitors Comscore, iSpot, and VideoAmp all received a special nod from the U.S. Joint Industry Committee (JIC), which certified the three as currencies of record ahead of the 2025-2026 broadcast TV season. 

A currency is the unit of value that ad buyers and ad sellers use to transact across the multibillion-dollar TV advertising industry. For years, Nielsen’s C3 and C7 panel ratings—which measure commercial viewership over a three- and seven-day period—were the industry standard.

The JIC certification comes as industry giant Nielsen is uniquely vulnerable as it tries to reinvent its currency for the future.

The company’s new panel + big data offering—which combines Nielsen’s traditional panel with data from cable, satellite set-top boxes, and smart TVs across 45 million households and 75 million devices—is the currency it’s backing for this year’s TV upfront season.

But two high-ranking media buyers have told ADWEEK that inconsistencies with Nielsen’s panel + big data have led to delays and disruptions in upfront negotiations, as millions of dollars hang in the balance.

Nielsen has urged advertisers to be patient. “A currency change is much different than a data change,” Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao told ADWEEK at Cannes Lions in June. “It’s a workflow change. It’s a work process change.”

Rivals like VideoAmp, Comscore, and iSpot, however, are chomping at the bit to undercut this core part of Nielsen’s business, with the JIC backing enhancing their long-term viability.

“The timing could not come at a more critical moment as the advertising industry is in flux, planning an upfront based on a methodology that is volatile,” Peter Liguori, the newly-named CEO of VideoAmp, told ADWEEK, of the company’s JIC acknowledgement.

Liguori added that the JIC accreditation should instill confidence in advertisers that they can transact on other currencies. After all, according to the VideoAmp CEO, “many audit committee members” are also part of the audit committee for the Media Rating Council (MRC), the other big measurement rating agency in the industry.

Loosening Nielsen’s tight grip

Despite Nielsen’s stumbles in recent years, it’s hard for competitors to get more than a toehold.

Even as some of those competitors celebrate the JIC accreditation, Nielsen’s panel + big data currency has MRC accreditation, which provides a more intensive measurement audit than the JIC. 

Also, the JIC accreditation isn’t going to impact the current upfront season, according to two ad buyers. It’s “too late at this point” in the upfront season to start using a new currency as a whole, one of those ad buyers said, especially with publishers already closing deals.

Still, the buyer noted that they’ve been encouraging clients to lean into alternative currencies for advanced audiences and data-driven linear.

For many measurement upstarts, the best opportunity to unseat Nielsen was in 2021, when it lost MRC accreditation for lowballing both local and national audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Nielsen regained national accreditation in April 2023.

Publicly, Nielsen claims it welcomes competition: “It makes us, and the industry, better,” a spokesperson said.

But it has also hammered its rivals with a steady drumbeat of lawsuits, filing ten patent infringement complaints over the last three years against competitors like TVision, HyphaMetrics, ACRCloud, and VideoAmp.

When VideoAmp got one lawsuit dismissed earlier this year, Nielsen swooped in with a new complaint, right before the company’s second Vampfront event in April, where it showcased new products to clients.

Nielsen’s vast resources give it the ability to file its never-ending lawsuits to weaken its competition, Liguori said. Even dismissals have a cost.

“It’s all part of their strategy to drain us of our financial resources,” he told ADWEEK. “When you’re a monolith, you can play that game.”

Liguori added that Nielsen’s strong public relations team also gives the company the upper hand: “It’s like a Lamborghini next to a horse and buggy,” he said.

A horse’s chance against a Lambo

Since Liguori took over the company in 2024 amid the exit of former CEO Ross McCray and layoffs affecting 20% of VideoAmp’s workforce, the company has been vocal in messaging against Nielsen, going to market with $600 million in investment and an offering comprising set-top-box and smart TV data from 40 million households and 65 million devices. It has also fortified itself with key partnerships with publishers such as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount.

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.”

Meanwhile, a Nielsen spokesperson has said the firm is “proud” to be the first company to earn accreditation for big data + panel and first-party live streaming, while it continues to expand out-of-home measurement.

“Big data + panel is the latest innovation that is driven, supported, and embraced by our clients, and it represents the most accurate measurement to date,” a Nielsen spokesperson said. 

At the same time, ad buyers are keeping the door open for competitors like VideoAmp.

“In the bigger 50,000-foot view, VideoAmp has made a lot of strides, and they’ve accomplished a lot,” a media buyer who attended Vampfront told ADWEEK. 

One media buyer speaking anonymously said that Nielsen is “not the only game in town,” and VideoAmp has “emerged as a true competitor.”