Once again, the TV/video upfront presentations scheduled for May will kick off the annual ad buying frenzy in which tens of billions of dollars will be invested. While this year the biggest concern will be the state of the roller coaster economy and its impact on ad budgets, another issue will be which audience measurement provider will be used as the negotiating currency for advertisers.
In recent years, Nielsen, which had dominated audience measurement for decades, has been challenged by several competitors; this will continue in the 2025-26 upfront.
During the 2024-25 season, Nielsen’s biggest rival was VideoAmp. In early October, Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, Paramount+, Pluto TV and a bullpen of cable networks, failed to renew their contractual agreement with Nielsen. Paramount cited cost as the primary reason for the impasse.
In addition, there has been a long festering frustration in Nielsen’s inability to measure cross-platform and advanced segmented audiences beyond traditional age/gender targets. As the primary Nielsen replacement, Paramount relied on VideoAmp. Early in the 2024-25 season, CBS made a number of decisions (i.e., program renewals) based on VideoAmp’s viewing data.
In early February, Paramount and Nielsen reached a contractual agreement. Under the new multiyear deal, Nielsen will measure all of Paramount’s platforms including national/local broadcast, all cable networks as well as streaming. The four-month impasse is believed to have been the longest time a prominent Nielsen client went without their ratings service in recent memory.
While the standoff was taking place, the Media Rating Council, an audience measurement watchdog, announced in January it had completed its accreditation procedure covering Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel National TV measurement. Nielsen is the first audience measurement provider to earn MRC accreditation for its big data sample, although rivals iSpot, Comscore and VideoAmp have been using big data sets for years.
Nielsen’s newly accredited national measurement service combines its long-running representative panel of about 42,000 households (101,000 persons) with data from cable/satellite set-top boxes and ACR data from smart TVs from 45 million households and 75 million devices. These suppliers of big data come from Comcast, Dish, DirecTV, Roku and Vizio.
As a result, Nielsen will no longer be producing panel only ratings, a methodology used as the negotiating currency since 1987. In a press release, Nielsen noted Big Data + Panel was used by a number of broadcasters and agencies during last year’s upfront negotiations. The new data set will be in place for the 2025 upfront negotiations.
Previously, the MRC had suspended Nielsen’s accreditation for local and national measurement in 2021 for undercounting audiences. Nielsen’s national ratings regained their accreditation in 2023. Nielsen’s local TV ratings service remains under accreditation suspension.
Last fall, the MRC announced it had approved the use of first-party live streaming data into Nielsen’s national ratings service. Among the beneficiaries is Amazon that will now be able to embed its own data for NFL Thursday Night Football and potentially upcoming NBA games with Nielsen. Amazon has held the belief that Nielsen has been undercounting actual viewing. The NFL supported the announcement.
Another change will be Nielsen’s expanded out-of-home coverage. In late January (in time for Super Bowl LIX), Nielsen announced it had enlarged it National TV out-of-home panel from 65% coverage of U.S. TV households to 100% (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).
While Nielsen and VideoAmp (and others) have been competing with content providers and advertisers, there has been another confrontation taking place in the courtroom. In early 2024, Nielsen filed a lawsuit against VideoAmp claiming it had violated two of Nielsen’s patents. That lawsuit was dismissed by the U.S. District Judge on March 31, 2025.
Within days of the dismissal, Nielsen filed another patent lawsuit in the same federal court against VideoAmp. This lawsuit involves the patents used for measuring out-of-home TV viewing via mobile phones.
Nielsen has had a history of suing competitive audience measurement companies over patent infringements. According to Ad Age, since 2021 (when the company lost its MRC accreditation), and including the most recent lawsuit against VideoAmp, Nielsen has filed ten claims against rival measurement companies. These include TVision, HyphaMetrics, ACRCloud and TVSquared (since acquired by Innovid). Four have been dismissed.
Gearing up for the upfronts, earlier this month, VideoAmp hosted an event called “The Vampfronts”. The event included testimonials from users, conversations with brand marketers, ad sales executives and ad agency personnel.
During the event VideoAmp announced it was undergoing accreditation with the MRC. According to Deadline, a prominent takeaway was “The Multi-Currency World Has Arrived”. In addition, VideoAmp announced a new multi-year agreement with TelevisaUnivision. In early May, Nielsen will be hosting their own press conference going over the latest audience trends.
In addition, in March, iSpot, another Nielsen competitor, announced the launch of the ad industry’s first business outcome solution capable of providing attribution, at scale, for video advertisers. The new service is called “Outcomes of Scale”, Paramount Global is the iSpot client to sign on.
Also, earlier this month, Comscore, a long-time Nielsen competitor, announced the MRC has awarded accreditation for their household-level TV measurement. This accreditation covers their national and local TV Time-Based Grid reports; specifically, only household, age and gender “households with” metrics.
Josh Chasin, Principal at Knot Simpler and a long-time media research veteran in the “alternative currency” battles, notes, “The upfronts are like the ultimate cage match. There are a few things going on. First, there are now four alternative currencies— VideoAmp, iSpot, Comscore… and Nielsen. By finally introducing their panel-plus-big-data solution, Nielsen is effectively now both the incumbent, and an alternative currency. So even if you use the same company, you’ve always used, you have to deal with discontinuous change; this should constitute an opportunity for their competitors.
Second, while Nielsen still dominates the transactional business based on age/gender persons demographics (e.g., Women 18-49), alternative currencies already command a dominant share of transactions done against advanced targets— auto intenders, advertiser first party data, and other precisely defined audiences. One reliable estimate I’ve heard is that 90% of advanced target business is now done using VideoAmp.”
Chasin concludes, “So, a key thing to watch this upfront will be, how much business is transacted against advanced targets? Because as business migrates from the traditional, linear/age-gender/ratings-based buying to addressable, impression-based, advanced target activation, the alternative currencies make more and more sense. And that’s the direction advertising is moving.”
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