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Nielsen’s $2 billion DoubleVerify acquisition is a big play for CMOs

Nielsen's planned purchase of Mark Zagorski's DoubleVerify is a move to deepen its advertiser-direct customer base. Stewart Cook/Variety/Penske Med...

DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski

Nielsen's planned purchase of Mark Zagorski's DoubleVerify is a move to deepen its advertiser-direct customer base.

Stewart Cook/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images

CMOs: Get ready to field more sales pitches from Nielsen.

The TV ratings giant surprised the ad industry by announcing plans to buy DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion — and sent chins wagging with hot takes about the implications.

At stake: trustworthy data.

CMOs depend on data to craft their strategies, but it's often patchy and unreliable. That's why they need credible auditors to double-check — or double-verify, if you will — those numbers. For CMOs, this deal could simplify audience measurement and ad verification, but consolidation would mean greater concentration of power under Nielsen and one fewer independent player.

Eric Salama, former CEO of data firm Kantar, told me the deal signals Nielsen's intent to move further into helping CMOs plan and allocate their media budgets. That, in turn, would mean building more direct relationships with advertisers rather than primarily serving media owners and agencies.

"As an advertiser, when you think about attribution and planning, you don't think of Nielsen, really," Salama said.

Building a single measurement currency

DoubleVerify made its name helping advertisers ensure their digital ads are viewable, free of fraud, and served alongside suitable content. It has since expanded into the ad performance space, in areas like campaign optimization and outcomes measurement.

DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski said in a statement that the combo would deliver "a single currency that scores media on both audience delivery and media environment quality."

A single currency also means placing faith in a single referee to determine what constitutes "quality" media.

In acquiring DoubleVerify, Nielsen would own both the tools that measure an advertiser's reach and those that test the purity of their media buys, Nomad Foods CMO Justin Billingsley wrote on LinkedIn.

"Together they are the two facts that let a buyer trust what a seller claims, and from 2027 they will sit inside a single private company whose own accounts nobody outside can read," Billingsley said.

DoubleVerify, previously publicly traded, will retain its name and separate corporate structure as part of Nielsen, which is privately held. (No NielsenVerify yet!)

That separation might ease some concerns about potential conflicts, but it could also make the benefits of the combination harder for advertisers to see — at least in the short term.

Ad measurement goes private

Once the deal closes, expected next year, there'll be even less public financial scrutiny of the ad measurement space as DoubleVerify exits the public markets. Nielsen itself has been privately owned by a private equity consortium since 2022. Meanwhile, DoubleVerify's closest rival, Integral Ad Science, was taken private by PE firm Novacap last year.

The not-so-small matter of integrating the two companies once the deal closes could open the door for rivals to pounce, touting their independence.

"Mediaocean and Peer39 will be interesting to watch," said Jay Friedman, cofounder of the adtech and martech discovery platform CartographAI, referring to measurement rivals that could take advantage.

Will Luttrell, the former CTO of DoubleVerify rival IAS, said that while conventional wisdom sometimes holds that private equity is where innovation goes to die, the opposite can also be true.

"It's an opportunity to make the longer-term bets and bigger swings that quarterly earnings scrutiny may not allow," Luttrell, who now runs the cybersecurity startup Honeycake, told me.

IAS, for example, hired Lidiane Jones as its CEO last month.

"They are replacing someone with a revenue background in the top chair with a bona fide software engineer," Luttrell said of the new IAS CEO. "It's hard to maintain long-term success without a technical person in the top chair, especially in a competitive industry that requires constant reinvention like adtech."

Marketers have spent years trying to make fragmented measurement systems work better together so they can understand both who their ads reached and whether those impressions were actually valuable. Nielsen-DoubleVerify promises some of the unification marketers are looking for, but the trade-off is a bigger reliance on a single company to provide it.

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Lara O'Reilly

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Lara O'Reilly is the anchor of the CMO Insider newsletter.She is a senior correspondent who has covered the digital advertising, marketing, and media industries since 2010. Her current beat includes big tech companies like Alphabet, and Meta, and adtech firms, agencies,  publishers, the creator economy, and CMOs.Lara has previously worked as a reporter and executive producer at titles including The Wall Street Journal, Digiday, Yahoo Finance, and Marketing Week. She was previously Business Insider's senior global advertising editor from 2014 to 2017.Lara was named "Digital Journalist of the Year" by the London Press Club in 2016.Lara is a regular guest on TV and radio and has appeared on outlets such as the BBC, NPR, SiriusXM's Wharton Business Daily, and CTV Television Network. She also frequently speaks on stage at major events such as Web Summit, IFA, VivaTech, Advertising Week, and Cannes Lions.To get in touch with Lara O'Reilly, email [email protected] or contact her on Signal at @loreilly.71Check out Insider's source guide for tips on sharing information securely.Read some of Lara's recent work below: