NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL eye new measurement partners in wake of Nielsen controversy

Measurement challengers are coming for the crown jewel of live TV — sports.

VideoAmp is discussing national currency deals with all four of the major professional sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) as well as the WNBA, UFC and WWE , executives tell The Current. Comscore says it’s also in active conversations with leagues.

And iSpot tells The Current that it’s in deep discussions on currency deals with large TV networks who own sports rights, including one prominent streaming service.

This comes after the NFL accused Nielsen of undercounting millions of viewers, particularly through streaming. VideoAmp confirmed its conversations with the NFL predate that public accusation.

Cracking Nielsen’s crown jewel

While total upfront spend has been flat over multiple years, streaming and live-sports commitments have skyrocketed.

Opening up competition within live sports would be a massive development for Nielsen’s rivals. Sports have been the cornerstone of the upfronts for years, with games dominating 86 of the top 100 U.S. broadcasts in 2024. Overall, $29.5 billion will be spent on U.S. live-sports rights in 2025, almost double the $14.6 billion from 2015, according to projections by S&P Global. For advertisers, live sports are the easiest way to reach mass audiences.

And as more live sports move to streaming, advertisers are following. Ad spend on live sports grew nearly 500% in the second half of 2024 compared to the first half, according to programmatic CTV partner Keynes Digital. The company expects those trends to hold this year.

This all leads to billions of dollars that challengers are trying to dislodge from Nielsen, which may be the most entrenched part of Nielsen’s business.

It’s all about building trust with major leagues and networks that a measurement company can handle those massive accounts, Dan Donnelly, head of sports strategy at VideoAmp, tells The Current.

“The biggest thing coming out of our work with the NFL is the fact that we’ve proved to them that we can ingest all of [their] streaming data,” Donnelly says. “Of course we can do it on the linear side too; that’s almost foundational. We’ve proven we can do it.”

Nielsen, for its part, is fending off any worry about the threat of competition, saying it delivers the best product of any currency company in the space. The legacy measurement giant has deals with every TV network, major sports league and holding company.

The future of currency

All this disruption comes as Nielsen retired its legacy panel-only measurement this year in favor of Big Data + Panel. Comscore Chief Commercial Officer Steve Bagdasarian calls this moment “a nexus point” that is fueling change.

Competitors like Comscore have been working for years to unseat Nielsen, not only as the standard in live-sports ratings but to create multicurrency world.

Live sports’ move toward streaming, however, cannot be understated in all of this. Nielsen believes its dominance continues shining in live streaming. The ratings giant has deals with Amazon, Netflix and YouTube and is working to get first-party data deals with ESPN, Fox, NBCUniversal and CBS.

With live sports’ mass scale, most ads are bought on demographic audiences. This dynamic is one of the things slowing down the shift from Nielsen into one of the advanced audience measurement companies like VideoAmp, the company’s chief revenue officer, Bryan Goski, says.

Still, streaming is a key place where Nielsen’s competitors believe they have an advantage since they’re digitally native and big-data focused. “For somebody like Nielsen, [live-sports currency] is an area that they will continue to fight tooth and nail to be able to maintain that position, because once you erode this particular area, it’s hard to claw back,” Bagdasarian tells The Current.

iSpot’s EVP of media partnerships, Stuart Schwartzapfel, envisions a future where the measurement challengers, who have big data at their core, will own live-sports streaming currency while Nielsen owns demo-based currency on linear TV.

“The more addressable opportunity is to focus on the place with less baggage [and] less legacy,” Schwartzapfel says. “And that’s streaming. The publishers are less entrenched than the networks are. They’re also more diversified businesses that can afford to try things out and leverage their multidimensional businesses for the better of this work stream.”

Scoring with outcomes

Mass reach isn’t the only major measurement point taken into consideration today. Nielsen and its competitors are all focusing more this year on driving outcomes. From iSpot partnering with Paramount to VideoAmp with Blockgraph to Comscore with Kochava, each shows the value intying TV ads to sales. Even Nielsen launched its own outcomes marketplace in August.

Conversion rates improved 36% while CPMs declined nearly 50% during streamed games from the first to second half of 2024, according to Keynes Digital.

Streaming unlocks this, as it’s easier to track outcomes with cross-device identity graphs, pixels and in-platform reporting connecting consumers’ behavior. For example, someone could see an ad on their smart TV and then buy the product on their phone.

“I’m not looking at reaching 50 million people, I’m looking at reaching a $50 CPA,” Keynes Digital Founder and CEO Dan Larkman says. “I think that is a massive differentiator.”

iSpot’s seen evidence of this as well during NFL games, with wireless carriers driving a 42% seven-day sales lift on NBC during Q4 of 2024, and insurance providers seeing a 38% seven-day sales lift on CBS.

“We’re talking about [ingesting] all of the league’s first-party fan data,” VideoAmp’s Donnelly says. “The leagues and the teams are sitting on so much of their own data; [once we] marry that with our viewership data, you can start to segment. A lot of that work on the league side has been really exciting.”

Sticking with the devil you know

This all spurs the innovation that challengers have been trying to champion for years, as they’ve been building their businesses. Nielsen has been criticized at every turn the past decade, even as the established legacy ratings giant for 75 years.

Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) President Sean Cunningham, whose industry trade body represents TV networks, added onto that criticism earlier this year by equating using Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel product to entering “a scene right now that has yellow caution tape around it. It’s an active investigation.”

Even with all that strife, agencies, TV networks and leagues have stood strong alongside Nielsen. Prasad Joglekar, who worked as an executive at Comscore, Viacom and Omnicom, summed up how he thinks the industry looks at Nielsen compared to its competitors.

“They all seem to have quirks and flaws, so I’m just going to continue with the devil I know,” says Prasad, who is now the CEO and founder of media planning software company Deben.