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Karthik Rao elevated to CEO of Nielsen
“Nielsen has named Karthik Rao, who headed Nielsen Audience Measurement, as CEO of the company, succeeding David Kenny, who will become executive chairman,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports.
The background: “Rao has been CEO of Nielsen Audience Measurement, the company’s biggest and most strategically important unit, since earlier this year, following a restructuring in the wake of the company being taken private,” Neff notes. “Prior to that, he was chief operating officer under Kenny when Nielsen was a public company. Kenny had been CEO since 2018, and retained that role as Nielsen went private.”
Essential context: “The move comes in the wake of an announcement that Nielsen would lay off 9% of its global workforce,” Neff adds. “Nielsen also faces mounting competition and pushback from TV networks, and in some cases, buy-side executives, over plans to incorporate Amazon Prime first-party data into “Thursday Night Football” measurement and make its newer big-data product an alternative to trading on its panel-based data, which is accredited by the industry’s quality arbiter, the Media Rating Council.
