When ADWEEK previously spoke with Nielsen this spring, CEO Karthik Rao mentioned that Nielsen was sunsetting C3 and C7. Are there any updates on that front?

C3 and C7 are here and not going anywhere. The reason for that is we’ve heard loud and clear from our clients—not from the industry—that it’s an important metric for them. It’s something that they need and are used to using as they run their business. So while we had initially, back in 2020, said that we intended to retire C3 and C7 because we thought an individual commercial rating was more directly comparable to digital measurement, and thus, the best way to think about it when you look at stuff across media or cross-platform. What we’ve heard is that, sure, there are ways to make television more granular, more comparable to digital, but you don’t have to do that and take away C3. There’s no reason for that.

Instead, we have launched, as we said we would, on time. We launched individual commercial metrics, which is an exact rating for every ad in a linear television program, and we need to produce C3 because they’re both valuable.

Nielsen is partnering with Netflix to measure the NFL Christmas Day games. Can you share the plans around that?

We’re proud and excited to be the measurement partner for Netflix for their NFL Christmas games—as we are for Amazon Thursday Night Football—and we’re proud that we’re accredited for this kind of measurement, for bringing first-party publisher data into our service in concert with our panel to measure live streaming. This goes back to what I said before about our measurement approach is to use a big data set in combination with panel, and we were proud to receive MRC accreditation for our first-party live-streaming methodology last month. It’s the first accredited streaming measurement product in the market.

There’s a lot of competition in the space now between Netflix announcing that they’re working with VideoAmp in the new year and there’s the ongoing dispute with Paramount. Are you able to share anything about that and what the competitive landscape could look like in the next year? 

In terms of the competitive landscape, Nielsen has always had competition, and that is a good thing because it drives us to be better. But it forces us to continually improve and provide better and better service, so we welcome that, and we’re proud of the quality and the innovation we put out in the market to keep pace with consumers.

Are there any other announcements to expect from Nielsen in the next year? 

We haven’t talked about it explicitly, so I’ll talk about the fact that our streaming measurement coverage is really unsurpassed. If you look across the publishers that we measure CTV ads for, we measure Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Roku, Tubi, and YouTube—you name it. We don’t have everybody, but we have really robust coverage of the CTV ad space. That was important given how much viewing is happening on streaming and given how many ad dollars are moving there. We’re proud of that coverage, and that’s an important ingredient, as I mentioned before, to our Nielsen One Ads product. So that’s an important thing. We always are continuing to expand that.