Nielsen is used to abuse.
“We get punched in the face for obvious reasons,” said Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao. “We’re the referee, we tell the score, and people don’t like it – but it comes from a position of strength, and with this acquisition, we’re playing offense.”
The acquisition he’s speaking of is Nielsen’s planned purchase of ad verification company DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion, marking the end of DV’s roughly 5-year run as a public company.
The deal, announced last week and set to close in Q1 of next year, sparked immediate debate over whether a verification company can remain truly independent once it’s owned by a measurement company with a stake in the same ecosystem it’s meant to police.
It’s a fair question, Rao said, and one he anticipated. “We gave this a fair amount of thought,” he said, “and I think the story is actually relatively simple.”
Rao spoke with AdExchanger about that story.
AdExchanger: DV verifies whether ads are reaching real people in quality environments. Now it’ll be owned by the company that measures those audiences – you guys. Make the case for independence.
KARTHIK RAO: There are two definitions of independence that matter here. The first is independence from managing media inventory. We don’t do that in this company and we will never be associated directly, in either ownership stake or otherwise, with companies that do.
The second part is transparency into how we do what we do, putting out standards and methodologies for people to see, understand and audit. That’s always been core to Nielsen, and it’s an important value we’ll carry forward with DV.
Yes, but DoubleVerify has been expanding into pre-bid, attribution and optimization for a while, which moves it beyond its roots as a neutral verifier. If Nielsen adds audience measurement and planning on top of that, doesn’t it complicate the independence argument?
It’s a good point, but the world has to evolve a bit. Assume independence, trust and transparency are the primary filters. After that, the question you really need to answer is, “What’s the best way to deal with waste or campaign outcomes you didn’t intend?”
For that, you need to make sure you have the best data and the most useful signals throughout the workflow, which is how DV has expanded. Brands are trying to maximize their success based on their goals – goals that are defined, by the way, not by DV or Nielsen. We have no skin in the game. Our businesses don’t make more or less money based on campaign outcomes, and this keeps a sense of neutrality, because the economic models aren’t designed around that.
What will the workflow look like? Today, Nielsen has its audience data, DV has verification signals and advertisers reconcile them on their own. What changes once Nielsen and DV are integrated?
We’re getting ready for a world where the agentic future will manifest and systems and agents talk to each other at every step of the workflow to influence the next step. The first version of that solves the immediate problem, which is that people shouldn’t have to reconcile two different data sets. That’s the main challenge today, because the only way to do it is with more humans.
The next version is building out the full workflow. Nielsen handles audience on the backend – the who – and then we handle campaign planning and budget allocation on the front end. DV is the middle layer. A client should be able to move from strategic planning to allocation decisions and then run a campaign, optimize along the way, look at what happened in totality and loop back if they need to all in one place.
Right now, people are jumping in and out of systems to do that, and it’s clunky.
What’s one thing you think the industry is underestimating about this deal?
Some folks have talked about it, but simplification. There’s a chance for a utopia here around the advertising dashboard; the whole ad workflow powered by the best data at every step and how much simplicity and effectiveness that can bring. This hasn’t fully caught on yet for folks, but it’s still early.
What’s one thing you think the industry is misunderstanding about this deal?
The independence discussion. You can create all kinds of scenarios around it, but the fact is that we don’t play in inventory, and that’s the definition that matters. This is much more about workflow optimization.
By the way, this is the second company Nielsen is acquiring with Mark Zagorski at the helm. He’s the CEO of DoubleVerify, and he was the CEO of eXelate, a third-party platform Nielsen bought in 2015. Are you just gonna keep acquiring every company Mark Zagorski runs? But seriously, will Mark be staying on in his same capacity once the deal closes?
Nobody’s asked me that yet! The last company Mark was at [Telaria, acquired by Rubicon/Magnite in 2019] did work in inventory and media, so that’s why we were hands off.
But yes, Mark stays on. He’s a world-class executive who can help amplify everything we’ve been building and been trying to accomplish at Nielsen over the past 18 to 24 months.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Karthik Rao, click here.
