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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.

Keep reading here.

Also read: Nielsen rival iSpot buys 605 as it bets on measurement outcomes driving TV currency

And: VideoAmp laying off 10% of workforce in the latest measurement shakeup

Hispanic audiences undercounted

Data validation firm Truthset is out with new research today—the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15)—showing that the American data industry overall is underrepresenting the U.S. Hispanic population.

Per Truthset’s analysis, shared first with Datacenter Weekly, just 58% of Hispanics were, on average, included in national datasets widely used by marketers in the second quarter of 2023. The company estimates that missing about two-fifths of the Hispanic audience translates to about 20 million consumers.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “U.S. 4-week average of jobless claims drops to lowest level in seven months,” per MarketWatch

• “Higher Gasoline Prices Boost Retail Sales,” The Wall Street Journal reports

• “August core inflation, excluding food and energy, rose 0.3%, hotter than expected,” per CNBC

• “Wholesale price inflation accelerated in August from historically slow pace,” The Associated Press reports

ICYMI: US ad employment gained 2,900 jobs in August, strongest growth in a year

Also see: Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news

McDonald’s tops ranking of food and beverage brands by social ‘share of influence’

Influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ is about to release its H1 2023 Food and Beverage Report (Datacenter Weekly got an exclusive first look); here are some of the key findings:

• CreatorIQ found that creators posted about food and beverage brands across social media more than 1.2 million times during the first half of 2023, driving an estimated 75.4 billion impressions, 3.0 billion engagements and $4.8 billion in EMV (earned media value).

• The top five brands in the food and beverage category in H1 2023, as ranked by what CreatorIQ calls “share of influence,” are:

1. McDonald’s: 3.9 billion est. impressions
2. Starbucks: 3.3 billion est. impressions
3. Red Bull: 1.5 billion est. impressions
4. Celsius: 1.4 billion est. impressions
5. Oreo: 1.9 billion est. impressions

Just briefly

• “Caesars paid millions in ransom to cybercrime group prior to MGM hack,” CNBC reports

• “Google Trial Spotlights Internal Dispute Over Algorithm vs Data,” from Bloomberg News

• “California legislature passes ‘Delete Act’ to protect consumer data,” per StateScoop

• “Apple's security message: Keep data safe by keeping it out of the cloud,” from AppleInsider

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.