Nielsen’s absence from the Joint Industry Committee is felt at inaugural event

For the first time, the months-long buzz around the U.S. Joint Industry Committee was personified as over 300 people from the agency, TV network and ad tech realms ascended to the 102nd floor of New York’s One World Trade Center on Thursday. The four-hour event convened industry leadership for a series of discussions on the state of multi-currency dealmaking and the progress of the committee currently managed by OpenAP, with one notable exception.

Nielsen remains the holdout from the JIC’s efforts to create standards around media measurement. And although the company was missing from the lineup of competitor measurement companies that took the JIC stage, it still managed to dominate the conversation.

Nielsen declined to comment.

Nielsen's absence

In the week leading up to the JIC event, Nielsen called out the organization in a letter for what it perceived as unfair requirements that would favor its new crop of competitors. Despite the JIC’s response, Nielsen’s absence from the JIC upfront doesn't suggest much optimism that the measurement company would join the group, particularly as Nielsen announced it would revert to panel-based data in spite of industry pushes for big data use in this year’s upfront dealmaking.

Read more: Nielsen's currency reversal upends upfronts

Of note in the back-and-forth was Nielsen’s assertion that the JIC is undermining the value of Media Ratings Council accreditation, the longstanding seal of approval for the accuracy of measurement data—which Nielsen lost in 2021 and only recently regained. John Halley, president of advertising at Paramount, said in the event’s opening panel the JIC’s purpose is not to audit data like the MRC, but to create roadmaps for big data products that can be utilized industry-wide.

“Saying that JIC certification should require MRC accreditation is just logically flawed—it doesn’t really make sense,” said Halley, noting that while Nielsen’s panel data was reaccredited, its big data add-on, Digital Ad Ratings product and upcoming Nielsen One platform are not. Halley said Nielsen’s push for MRC accreditation as part of JIC requirements “is weaponizing the MRC. I think there’s no other way to look at it.”

That’s not to say that networks and agencies won’t still trade on Nielsen during this year’s upfront using both its panel and big data offerings. Jon Steinlauf, chief U.S. advertising sales officer at Warner Bros. Discovery, said his company has “agencies that are asking to negotiate this upfront on big data, and we would like to take them up on it, whether it’s Nielsen, VideoAmp, Comscore.”

Similarly, TelevisaUnivision is “leaning in so hard to what Nielsen is doing with the big data sets because it's finally bringing equity” to multicultural audience measurement, said Donna Speciale, the Hispanic media company’s president of advertising sales and marketing. Concerns over Nielsen’s ability to accurately capture diverse audiences through its 41,000-household panel have long been a point of contention for the company.

“Dollars are not being put into this [multicultural] marketplace because of the lack of representation” in measurement, said Speciale. “We have been looking at the big data from Nielsen and the numbers are enormous. That’s because we’re playing catch-up for decades of invisibility in this area. We can’t wait any longer.”

Read more: Donna Speciale on the TV upfront market

Feedback from measurement companies

While measurement companies such as iSpot.tv, Comscore and VideoAmp have shared the stage previously, such as at Paramount’s recent Measurement Now conference, they’ve had far fewer opportunities to weigh in on the JIC than the agencies and TV companies in it.

This time joined by fellow participants in the JIC RFI process, 605, Innovid and Samba TV, the companies brought forward their needs for the industry. Top of mind was whether or not sellers and buyers will actually commit to transacting on new currencies during the upfront.

“I can probably commit on behalf of all of [the present measurement companies] that we’re down with the JIC standards,” said Ross McCray, founder and CEO of VideoAmp. “I think the question is, are the buyers and sellers going to allow it to happen or not?”

As upfront negotiations begin, agencies have spoken out about their desire to use non-Nielsen currencies, and media companies including Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal have certified alternatives for transaction this year. However, it’s frequently noted that this song-and-dance has happened in years past, with minimal movement.

Also of concern to the measurement companies were the media partners that have held out from joining the JIC, including Disney, Netflix, Amazon and YouTube.

“The impressions that come from the non-JIC programmers are too important to leave behind,” said Carol Hinnant, chief revenue officer at Comscore. “The buy-side is not going to be able to live without understanding the impressions coming from ‘Thursday Night Football.’”

An update on capabilities

During the event, OpenAP presented progress on a data-sharing product that it’s asking media companies to participate in called the “Streaming Data Service,” which will operate via Snowflake’s cloud-based infrastructure. The service will aggregate the participating media companies’ data clean rooms into a mega-clean room, or what Ed Davis, OpenAP’s president of product and operations, called a “federated DCR.”

This will allow advertisers to plan audience-based buying against all participating programmers’ first-party data in one place and evaluate overlap across them. Davis said the foundation of the software is complete, and the next step—determining the granularity of data to be offered by the JIC-participating companies and constructing the framework for that data to be comparable and deliverable for ad planning—is next, with an update projected for the JIC’s next event during the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Overall, the substantial turnout at Thursday's event was encouraging to multiple attending executives that spoke to Ad Age. While conversations around adopting new measurement methods have proliferated for years, one network executive said the attention brought onto the topic by the JIC and the upfront event has already begun to move the needle in conversation with advertisers.

Another network executive said the event itself is unlikely to make any change on its own, calling it a “coming out party,” but that it represents broader progress being felt behind the scenes.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done, but this was a good first step,” said the executive.