Bill Livek is retiring as CEO of Comscore, which has launched a search for a successor at a critical time for the measurement company as it vies for a place among competitors to Nielsen in TV and cross-media measurement.

Livek will stay on as CEO until a successor is found and remain non-executive vice chair through the end of his term in mid-2024. A Comscore statement said the board has retained Spencer Stuart to conduct a search for his successor and will consider internal and external candidates.

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Livek became CEO in November 2019, replacing interim CEO Dale Fuller, who served for seven months following the abrupt departures of former CEO Bryan Wiener and President Sarah Hofstetter earlier that year (they later joined e-commerce analytics firm Profitero). Livek had been CEO of movie and TV measurement business Rentrak prior to that company’s merger with Comscore in 2016.

“Bill ensured that Comscore is in a stronger position than it’s ever been and prepared to serve as the future of media measurement,” said Brent Rosenthal, the company’s chairman, in a statement.

“I am so proud of what we have accomplished together as a team to make Comscore synonymous with census measurement,” LIvek said in the statement.

During his tenure as CEO, Livek oversaw a recapitalization of the company that left it largely debt-free.
 

Nielsen's plans

Troubles for giant competitor Nielsen, including suspension of its Media Rating Council accreditation last year, have created an opening for Comscore to win a bigger piece of media measurement. But at the same time, newer venture-capital-funded competitors such as VideoAmp and iSpot.tv, and TVSquared, the latter recently acquired by Innovid, have been trying to win footholds as Nielsen challengers.

Comscore applied for MRC accreditation for its own TV and cross-platform measurement in August following a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful attempt last decade. Other Nielsen competitors are preparing to apply but have yet to do so.

Comscore and VideoAmp in particular have been offered by a growing number of media companies as currency alternatives to Nielsen in time for the coming upfront, including Paramount and Discovery.

For its part, Nielsen has shrugged off the prospect of increased competition, with CEO David Kenny in an earnings conference call today saying such alternative providers would as most offer “secondary guarantees” to a still dominant Nielsen currency.

Nielsen beat revenue and analyst earnings forecasts according to figures released today. Kenny said progress on its next-generation One cross-platform measurement product, which uses big data sets similar to Comscore and other competitors, remains on track for a late 2022 start and full operation in time for the 2024 upfronts.

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Kenny also said Nielsen should have “success criteria” and audits required by the MRC for its existing panel-based TV ratings service to be done by “mid-year,” and expects a vote by the industry self-regulatory body at an unspecified time after that. Similarly, Chief Operating Officer Karthik Rao said audits that could pave the way for Digital Ad Ratings, another key Nielsen measurement service, should be complete in March.

Comscore's stock has not recovered much of the ground lost after Wiener and Hofstetter resigned in 2019, and Nielsen's stock has been sinking since May, when it first revealed that pandemic workarounds for maintaining its TV measurement panel had led to undercounting audiences. Even after a seemingly positive earning report today, Nielsen shares were down 0.85%.