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In Moldafsky’s estimation, much of the public—both entrenched in the industry and not—hold misguided or outdated perceptions about Nielsen; namely, that it’s still the same linear TV-centric measurement company that it was years ago, and has not progressed at the same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.