Fireside Chat – Highlights: 

Featuring David Kenny, Chief Executive Officer & Chief Diversity Officer, Nielsen 

August 27th 2020 1pm EDT  

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 

Introduction  

Madison Alley Global Ventures virtually hosted an exclusive one-on-one Fireside Chat featuring David Kenny, Chief Executive Officer & Chief Diversity Officer, Nielsen. 

Overview of Nielsen Holdings  

• A premier market leader in global measurement and data analytics. 
• Nielsen is divided into two business units.  

• Nielsen Global Media provides media and advertising industries with unbiased and reliable metrics that create a shared understanding of the industry required for markets to function. 

• Nielsen Global Connect provides consumer-packaged goods manufacturers and retailers with accurate, actionable information and insights and a complete picture of the complex and changing marketplace that companies need to innovate and grow.  

• Global footprint in over 100 countries with services that span 90% of the world’s GDP and population. 

Note:  On November 1, 2020, Nielsen announced the sale of its Global Connect business to Advent International for $2.7 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021. 

Company Snapshot   

• Founded in 1923, led by CEO & CDO David Kenny (since November 2018) 

• ~100 Markets worldwide, HQ: New York, NY 
• 47-53%, 2019 revenue split between Nielsen Global connect & Nielsen Global Media  
• ~46,000 FTEs 
• As of Feb 2019, Organization of Global Connect and Global Media  
• $5.6B Market Capitalization 

• $6.4B LTM Net Revenue as of 6/30/20 
• 30+ years Average relationship of top 10 clients 

2020 Industry Outlook   

• Nielsen Global Connect has evolved its business and provides consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers with actionable information and a view of the complex and changing marketplace that brands need to adapt, innovate and grow their businesses. 
• Since the pandemic began, the majority of the world is working remote, therefore video consumption and streaming has increased, and this is going to be a mainstay behavior for the foreseeable future. 

Media Consumption Behavior  

• Nielsen works with extraordinary and different types of data that represent difficult challenges.  
• Given the acceleration of media consumption it is imperative to track consumers and behaviors: 

• Measuring and tracking consumers across all channels and being able to have a single identity and understand behavior across all channels 

• Nielsen has confidence that they have a methodology that works: 

• They have committed to upgrading a substantial amount of data sets and investment 
• Ten-fold increase in the number of streaming meters, in order to obtain granular data not just of what platform you’re streaming on but what show you’re watching on each platform  

• Nielsen is looking to overhaul and simplify onto a single platform– as David Kenny quoted “It’s a streaming platform or a broadcast network – how do we get to a single metric in an apples to apples comparison that helps the advertisers and their agencies efficiently scale” 

• Question: Michael Siedler from Madison Alley (MA) asked: “Talk about or clarify – what does that single metric – exactly measure and what would that cover?” David Kenny’s response: “It is going to cover how many people can watch the content, how many people watch an ad and how many times did they see it and how do you duplicate it; is it part one and then part two? How does it correlate, these are more inference models and how they correlate, how confident are you that that the ad is related to these outcomes – so that you can go back and make the investments where they come on the ad side – it’s equally important on the content side” 

• Regarding the future and competitive nature of the industry – David Kenny explains: “I think the whole nature of competition is different in streaming because consumers have so many more choices; for example, a movie selling to a network or packaging the network selling it to a cable channel and then you just compete on schedule, now there are so many more things to compete for share reviewing and I think are helping the kind of producers know what content people love by segment, and helping in the discovery process also helps on the programming side and I think we’ve got as much of a role to play on the programming side in the future” 

The Future of Nielsen 

• Nielsen is focused on privacy and protecting consumer data.  They believe privacy is a real issue, and the severity of providing a service that will not be misused. 
• Consumer data is only used for understanding the audience and letting the audience be represented without acquiescing their right to privacy.  There is collective frustration about cookies but platforms have little choice due to privacy compliance requirements, for targeting of the system and requiring privacy friendly but verifiable high scale data.   
• Nielsen is directly impacted by evolution because they are able to monitor consumer habits since they’re participating on their behalf and validating the statistics, and are also heavily focused on machine learning to analyze data.  
• Regarding models and big data – inferences can be verified with small data – panels improve the data and are important in a number of industries.  It is an integral part of the statistics; however, the statistics do include other data feeds, sources and how cookies are also used.  Nielsen has been working on a product that is proprietary, which is an ID platform that can work for the media.  

Leadership in Crisis 

• On Leadership: Question from Michael Siedler at Madison Alley (MA): “In comparison to leaders across Akamai and IBM Watson and now that you’re leading Nielsen which has roughly about 40,000 people worldwide – could you talk about the challenges particularly this year of leading in a crisis of so many working remotely? Working to enhance the panels and the fieldwork – how do you lead and manage a global organization?  Could you provide some insight into that?”  David Kenny’s response: “The reason I don’t spell out on the chart chief executive officer is actually because I think CEO means Chief Energy Officer because the job in this seat is to provide energy and focus the energy on the right opportunities and the right challenges and as I look at channeling our energy in this environment, first of all, I think we have to have clarity on where the issues are and what’s changed and where you have to confront it. This crisis is unlike anything else.  I took Akamai through the financial meltdown, IBM had different crises of their own making sometimes but this crisis – is long and extended and it’s more like being in wartime – some of the changes are permanent”  

• On Communication.  Important communication goes both ways – to do a lot of listening and understand at a very human level what people are dealing with and leadership to do their best to help employees do their jobs effectively in a new environment and build a culture that can work and sustain. 

Diversity and Inclusion 

• Question from Michael Siedler from (MA): “Prior to the recent pandemic and the unrest, your title was CEO and Chief Diversity Officer – could you talk about why that’s so important to you and why you’ve made it a point to do that?”  David Kenny’s response: “It’s a theme inside the other points we’ve covered – so if we go back to the need of great data you need the best data to make the best decisions – this I learned the hard way; if you don’t include everyone in the data – it gets biased and data has inherent biases in it” 
• The only real way to understand what’s occurring in the audience is to understand the data, secondly, data also leads to accountability – there’s a lot of people who their revenues, bonuses and their targets are tied to their ratings.  David Kenny and Nielsen want to add to those inclusion ratings: “We’re actually saying what was the cast and what was the production staff and how inclusive was it – our measuring of these things helps the industry raise the bar, so I think that’s important and really understanding the economic product so all those things about our product needed to make sure that you know diversity is not a Nielson’s HR function – it’s at the core of our promise to represent the total audience”  

• In order to achieve full diversity in the product, you also need to make sure that you have a diverse team that’s working on the product, selling and marketing the product, Nielson has diversified their staff to bring representation to the work force.  

Summary & Q&A 

• Question from Roland Gossett, CEO of Commerce Technology platform: “As you focus your attention on Nielsen Media – what technologies do you consider essential for Nielsen to own to accelerate growth in its core measurement business?  David Kenny’s response: “We’re in the process of moving everything to public cloud so we don’t need to own infrastructure – we do need to own our cybersecurity around the infrastructure because we have precious assets. I do think that because we’re in measurement we have to own identity and we have to have an identity platform that we can validate with real data so the sort of panel identity access is important because all of our products are a derivative from it and I think there are core algorithms” 
• Question from Roger Korman, Chairman and President of DMD Marketing: “Since independent measurement and transparency is key, what is your view on Google’s decision to stop allowing third-party pixel tracking of ads and migrating its measurement vendors to Ads Data Hub?” Response from David Kenny: “I don’t think there was a choice but to deprecate the pixel tracking – it had gone too far and bad things could happen so I think it was the responsible thing to do and Ads Data Hub – we work closely with it –we want to see some things improve and I think they’re working really well with us to get it done but, Google does need to make sure they work with us and others to achieve independent measurement – they don’t see everything so our ability to measure the whole business and do it independently and verify- is important, there are ways to solve it within this construct, I don’t think the construct in itself is wrong; I think there’s some work to do around it on independent measurement and the different approaches to identity which is as much on us as it is on Google”  
• In summary, Nielsen has shed light not only on the focus of the integrity of data but also on consumer behavior, accountability, and the social impact that Nielsen is having on its leadership.