Nielsen rebrands amid measurement troubles

Nielsen is reinventing itself after a series of missteps that have brought the long-dominant measurement giant’s status into question, with the company debuting a new logo and mission statement today with the aim of changing the perception of the company. The move comes after a whirlwind year for Nielsen, which sold off its NielsenIQ business, which measures retail shopping behavior for packaged-goods companies, in early 2021, and has since refocused on delivering measurement, audience and content products as it continues to develop its cross-media measurement solution, Nielsen One, which is slated to launch in late 2022. But recent months have been turbulent for the measurement company after the Media Rating Council showed that Nielsen undercounted TV viewership during the month of February by as much as 6%, causing advertisers to lose out on potentially hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ad revenue. Soon after, the MRC suspended Nielsen’s accreditations for TV ratings in the U.S., at least temporarily, leaving an opening for competitors to make inroads in the video measurement space. But it’s far from a perfect world as many of Nielsen’s peers, such as VideoAmp and Comscore, also currently lack MRC accreditation. “[The rebrand] is not to deflect at all,” said Jamie Moldafsky, Nielsen’s chief marketing and communications officer, adding that the company’s visual overhaul has been in the works since at least January. “It’s to reflect the accuracy of what we’re currently doing.” In Moldafsky’s estimation, much of the public—both entrenched in the industry and not—hold misguided or outdated perceptions about Nielsen; namely, that it’s still the same linear TV-centric measurement company that it was years ago, and has not progressed at the same pace as the digital world. “People just didn’t know the whole story of Nielsen,” Moldafsky said, pointing to the company’s ability to measure streaming and offer deep-dive analytics in addition to its original TV ratings business. “There’s all these capabilities that have kind of gotten lost in that MRC story,” she continued, dismissing the notion that the rebrand’s timing is meant to put distance between Nielsen’s business and its recent measurement hiccups. “If anything, we’d always planned it for around now,” she said, also citing a desire for increased transparency as a driver of the rebranding. Nielsen’s new corporate look will be publicly unveiled during this week’s Advertising Week New York festivities, and will roll out across the company’s physical and digital properties effective immediately. The revamped logo adds significantly more color than the previous grey-heavy wordmark, with the iconography playing on the “universal play button,” Nielsen said in a statement. There's also the ‘N’ in the negative space between the triangles similar to the subtle arrow hidden in FedEx’s logo. On top of Nielsen’s logo makeover, the New York-based company also seized on its rebrand as an opportunity to pen a new mission statement symbolic of what Moldafsky sees as its role in the world: “Powering a better media future for all people.” The company had already been evolving internally, she said, with its new purpose statement acknowledging that. “I’m a big believer that you don’t really rebrand until you’ve already transformed the company,” Moldafsky said. However, at least for the time being, Nielsen’s long-standing slogan, “Audience is everything,” isn’t going anywhere, she confirmed.

Nielsen rebrands amid measurement troubles

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