Future of TV Briefing: TV ad industry’s measurement currency frustrations hit (another) boiling point

The most consistent aspect of today’s TV measurement landscape may be its inconsistency. Or more to the point, the frustration across both buy and sell side with the lack of consistency in TV’s measurement currency.

This currency inconsistency was a dominant topic during the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement’s CIMM Summit last week. And it’s the target of the measurement-centric trade group’s new Strong Foundations Implementation Task Force, which CIMM is looking to form with involvement from other industry organizations.

Among the task force’s aims, it will look to develop “a plan for strengthening the current [measurement] accreditation process” and create “a provider-neutral currency requirements framework,” CIMM managing director Jon Watts said on stage on Sept. 23.

But wait, isn’t there already a measurement accreditation process managed by the Media Rating Council? And also, didn’t a bunch of companies form the U.S. Joint Industry Committee, in large part, to create a certification process and establish baseline requirements for measurement currencies?

Yes and yes. But given the conversation around measurement currency at the moment, those efforts aren’t sufficing. And a big reason they’re insufficient is that the major currency providers aren’t really playing ball.

Over the summer, VideoAmp and Nielsen (for its Nielsen One measurement system) pulled out of the MRC’s accreditation process. Meanwhile, Comscore, iSpot.tv and VideoAmp have participated in the U.S. J.I.C.’s currency certification program — with each receiving certification renewals last week — but Nielsen has twice-opted not to submit for certification.

This splintering is a splinter to the eye for an industry that is transitioning from a single-currency era dominated by Nielsen to a multi-currency marketplace. 

“We can’t get to a multi-currency environment until you can look at it more apples to apples,” Brittany Slattery, CMO of OpenAP, the advanced advertising firm that is a founding member of the U.S. J.I.C., said on stage on Sept. 23.

“The next phase of measurement maturity is less about the complexity of any single data set and [instead] really our ability to tie those together, to make it more harmonized, if you will,” said Helen Katz, evp of research at Publicis Media on stage on Sept. 23.

Nielsen doesn’t necessarily have much incentive to play nice. It’s already the predominant measurement currency — the “baseline,” as Disney svp of addressable sales Jamie Power put it on stage on Sept. 22 — and the more it can separate itself from alternative currencies, the more challenging it will be for ad buyers and sellers to replace Nielsen as the primary currency.

But ad buyers and sellers are already using other measurement providers as currencies. Versant-owned CNBC uses a firm called Cogent as its measurement currency, according to Tom Winiarski, evp of ad sales strategy and monetization at Versant, in an on-stage session on Sept. 22. And Omnicom-owned media agency Initiative uses VideoAmp “for audience buying for a huge amount of our clients,” said Initiative’s chief investment officer Tim Hill in the same session. As for Nielsen, while Hill said he expects to continue to use the measurement provider, “we’re working through a lot of changes with them.”

That’s a polite way to allude to the other source of frustration among TV ad buyers and sellers with today’s measurement currency situation. Over the past two years, Nielsen has implemented methodology changes in an attempt to shore up some of its panel-based measurement deficiencies while incorporating big data-based measurement. Those changes have forced TV networks, ad agencies and advertisers to recalibrate their own audience evaluations — and, more to the point, valuations — without a reliable understanding of how the changes actually change audience counts.

“We had two years to evaluate differences between one data set and another. And what we forecasted at the top of that year did not materialize the way we thought. So now we have, what, half-a-second to evaluate that data and, what, one crumb of data. We have no idea what that impact was. We know what the impact was to the process at the top of the cycle. What this is going to look like for the remainder of this year is up for grabs,” said Mariel Estrada, head of video currency at Omnicom Media Group on stage on Sept. 23.

“Nielsen can be challenging when they change methodologies or do those kinds of adjustments that have sort of bigger swings than we’d like in terms of using it as a baseline,” said Dan Riess, evp and COO of U.S. advertising at TelevisaUnivision on stage on Sept. 22.

All of which have created the conditions for CIMM to now form the Strong Foundations Implementation Task Force. This initiative seems intent on setting a level playing field via cross-industry collaboration — without setting off antitrust alarms — but it’s still in its extremely early stages, seeking out industry members to participate. Whoever ends up joining the effort will have their work cut out for them. Whether its efforts will work, well, we may know the answer to that by the end of next year.

“If after 12 to 18 months we haven’t made significant progress, we will disband the task force,” said Watts.

I guess my question there is: How will that progress be measured?

What we’ve heard

“A few years ago, we weren’t minting 20-something-year-old millionaires at the rate that we are now with these creator businesses.”

— Baukunst’s Kate McAndrew on creators’ equity deals

Numbers to know

$21.49: New monthly subscription price for Disney+’s and Hulu’s respective ad-free tiers.

$1 million: Minimum budget for projects to be eligible for the proposed U.S. federal film and TV tax credit.

$7.5 billion: How much money Paramount Skydance is looking to raise to finance its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and pay down its debt.

$77.2 billion: Paramount’s estimated net debt after it closes the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

What we’ve covered

YouTube invests in AI agents, live ‘gamification,’ and editing tools to keep creators close:

• YouTube is piling on AI agents, live “gamification,” and new testing tools as it looks to keep creators, and their ad dollars, firmly within its ecosystem.
• The platform released a slate of new discovery, livestreaming and analytics features to help creators reach more viewers and make more money on YouTube, even as questions linger over how these tools will reshape discoverability and content strategy.

Read more about YouTube’s new creator tools here.

Marketers have bought into microdramas — but a lack of ROI might make them irrelevant:

• Digiday spoke with four marketers who said it’s less about creating a business case around these snackable dramas and more about capturing shopper attention in a fragmented digital ecosystem.
• New research from Snap and Ipsos says 42% of daily social media users report watching microdramas (or Short Dramas as Snap labels them) daily.

Read more about brands’ microdrama strategies here.

From brand deals to equity deals: creators want a stake, not just a fee:

• Alix Earle becoming a strategic equity investor in soda brand Poppi in 2024 was just the start.
• Earlier this month, Cherub, a fundraising and deal-matching platform that connects startup founders with angel investors, held a private, application-only summit for 100 creators looking to learn more about angel investing and startup equity.

Read more about creators’ equity deals here.

LLMs keep citing YouTube in search results:

• Meltwater’s data showed that YouTube was the most-cited platform by eight AI platforms in August.
• According to Tinuiti’s Q2 2026 AI Citation Trends report, YouTube’s share of citations in Google AI Mode more than quadrupled between January and April 2026, while it’s share in AI Overviews more than doubled.

Read more about YouTube’s AI search citations here.

Some creators want to negotiate deals like TV networks:

• Over the last year, creators have been pulled into TV and streamers’ upfront and NewFronts negotiations, while companies like Spotter, Forbes, Walmart, and the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) have held their own creator-centric versions of the traditional media sales event.
• The creator upfront doesn’t slot neatly into a traditional media upfront, and it’s increasingly feeling like there needs to be a new approach, according to marketers, agents, and creator economy experts.

Read more about creator upfronts here.

What we’re reading

Paramount+’s pre-merger makeover:

Paramount Skydance is looking to make some updates to its flagship streaming service — such as a comments section and AI-powered video clipping — and still plans to add a free tier ahead of its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to Business Insider.

OpenAI’s creator product push:

ChatGPT’s parent company has poached three top execs from Patreon, including co-founder Sam Yam who is now heading OpenAI’s new creator product division, according to Tubefilter.

WPP’s AI production hub:

AI production may not seem like something that needs any physical space — except maybe a data center — but the agency holding company’s production arm has opened up a 34,000-square-foot studio in London designed to support AI-powered, human and virtual productions, according to Adweek.