As we close out 2025, the news just keeps on coming, spanning ad tech and CTV.
First, picking apart Nielsen ratings has been going on since the heyday of cable TV. And the VAB is firing on all cylinders against Nielsen for what it says are frequent 20% discrepancies between its panel, which is already halfway out the door, and its newer Big Data set, which models off the panel data. But Nielsen says the VAB didn’t analyze its data correctly.
Our associate editor Victoria McNally talks about this latest Nielsen-VAB standoff and what it might mean for TV measurement in 2026.
Plus, in addition to the Netflix-Warner Brothers and Paramount drama we covered last week, there were TWO more acquisitions, including Pinterest acquiring tvScientific. We offer a quick explainer about what Pinterest saw in tvScientific to wrap up the TV half of this podcast.
Then, if publishers were to write a letter to Santa Claus for a new version of Google Ad Manager, it would be for a version without Unified Pricing Rules. Lower fees wouldn’t hurt either. And that’s what publishers in the EU are experiencing, as Google is making changes ahead of potential regulation or even divestiture over in Europe. Our senior editor James Hercher offers us the rundown on what Google is changing across the Atlantic and how these changes might be observed by Judge Brinkema, as she evaluates the remedies for Google running a monopoly across its ad server and ad exchange.
