Is Peter Liguori the man to (finally) make alternative TV measurement viable?

The incumbent

Market research pioneer Arthur Nielsen quite literally invented panel-based TV ratings back in the 1950s and the company he founded, now known as Nielsen Media Research, has been dominant in the space ever since. Since 2022, when it went private (a year after splitting off its market research arm NIQ), financials have been locked away, but the price for Nielsen back then totalled $16bn.

After decades of dominance, the last few years have exposed chinks in the behemoth’s armor. In 2021, amid accusations that its viewership reporting during the Covid-19 pandemic was inaccurate, the Media Rating Council suspended Nielsen’s accreditation, which it wouldn’t regain until 2023.

A range of disruptors from the adtech world have long been ready to move in for a greater share of the pie, encouraged by rapid and repeated changes to TV viewing, including the inexorable rise of ad-supported streaming formats.

But no one’s quite cracked it yet, with Nielsen defending most of its territory. But this year brings a pivotal moment, with Nielsen dropping its long-held ‘panel-only’ approach to measurement in favor of a new offering, ‘big data + panel.’ The pretenders to the throne – adtech shops birthed in the big data pond – hope this is the opening they’ve been waiting for. Shops, that is, like VideoAmp.

The challenger

Nielsen’s panel-based approach has underwritten the way in which most TV ads are sold for decades, underwriting a ‘currency’ that determines the value of an ad.

The competition for Nielsen’s crown has consisted of the attempt to establish ‘alt currencies’ undergirded by big data models rather than panels alone. The promise is that these more fine-grained data models make for more detailed and targeted media buys, which can command a higher price for media owners.

VideoAmp has emerged as one of the leading alt-currency providers and has attracted significant investment along the way, but it (alongside other challengers) has had well-publicized struggles in making that currency stick. In January of last year, a second round of redundancies coincided with a change at the top, with board member Peter Liguori stepping in as chairman.

“It hasn’t been easy and it never is,” Liguori tells The Drum. But his tenure has brought good news too. In the $80bn US TV ads industry, he says, VideoAmp has risen to transacting about $3bn of that, translating to $100bn of currency-based revenue for the company projected this year. That was buoyed by a period when streaming giant Paramount, locked into its own well-publicized battle with Nielsen, ran VideoAmp’s tech for four months.

As the currency side of the business finally comes good, Liguori says it’ll make up about 60% of the organization’s revenue, with the other 40% coming from various pieces of ‘buy-side’ work, working with media agencies to optimize their buys. That side of the business took a boost last month with the launch of ‘cross-screen planning tool’ VXP, launching with data from the likes of Disney and Paramount.

The promise to publishers is to increase value from their ad inventory, including by embracing the massive opportunity for addressable media (in which different users are served different ads at the same time) while reducing waste. The promise to agencies is to undercut Nielsen on price (though he concedes that the incumbent’s rates are carefully guarded). The promise to both sides is to skirt the inherent “biases” of a panel-based model as “big data veterans” – compared with Nielsen, which, in a description the latter would no doubt reject, he labels “big data rookies.”

But as VideoAmp has grown, the competition hasn’t proven particularly friendly. Nielsen claims that many of its challengers have infringed its patents – a charge it has brought to the courts repeatedly. Competitors TVision, HyphaMetrics and TVSquared have all been sued by Nielsen in recent years – as has VideoAmp.

A first suit (claiming that VideoAmp’s use of tech to use mobile device location data to draw demographic conclusions about who’s watching digital content) was dismissed by a Delaware court last month, only to be replaced by a fresh suit days later. In a statement, Nielsen reasserted the claim that VideoAmp was using its tech without authorization and said that it would “continue to vigorously defend” its intellectual property rights “to the fullest extent possible.”

For his part, Liguori tells The Drum, he wants to “compete on the field rather than the courtroom” – but he acknowledges the strength of his determination to take on Nielsen. “It’s a monolith. I call it the measurement-industrial complex. It’s a 102-year-old company that has been the currency of choice with a 90%-plus market share and it’s inadequate. It needs to be disrupted.”

Producer, marketer, programmer, adtech guy

Liguori’s pitch that he’s the man to finally crack the Nielson-challenger code rests in part on his own history. With one foot in the TV industry and the other in advertising, he says he’s always had a “gnawing desire to disrupt industries” as he’s cut a path through both.

First there was good old-fashioned advertising, as an account manager at Saatchi & Saatchi and later Ogilvy, working on consumer brands like Tide. Realizing that “account managers were not really the driving force of an ad agency,” Liguori hopped to TV as one of the people who set up HBO’s home video division. He would later become head of consumer marketing for the network.

Liguori’s CV of TV programming and marketing roles tell the story of a medium constantly in flux over the last few decades. The roles of advertising and subscriptions have been entangled in a dance that has swung back round to the ‘both ads and subscriptions’ model increasingly favored by streamers. “The studios at that time did not want home entertainment front-and-center – their fear was that it could hurt the cinema business – and creators didn’t want their fine works of art diminished to a 26-inch television screen… we were the heel of the industry,” Liguori says. “But in fact, home video saved the movie industry”.

“People were saying, ‘Are you kidding me? Someone is actually going to pay for television?’ But everything old is new again, as we now see streamers that are the equivalent of HBO 25 years ago.”

In a long TV career, Liguori’s other highlights include stints at Discovery and as chief executive of Tribune Media. He was instrumental in launching Fox Sports and had a stint at FX during its pivot (with The Shield, Nip/Tuck and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) to what Liguori calls “ad-supported premium quality adult television and storytelling.”

What did the experience teach him? That subscribers and advertisers alike favor one thing above all else: quality. “On The Shield, we went from year one with advertisers saying that it had too much sex and violence to winning a bunch of awards, so ‘sex and violence’ became ‘romance and action’ in year two. Quality conquers all.”

‘Leaving a legacy for storytellers’

For Liguori, disrupting the TV measurement industry isn’t only a possible billion-dollar opportunity; it’s personal. The 65-year-old says he has one eye on his legacy. “I’ve done both jobs. I’ve sold ads. I’ve made ads. I’ve bought media. I am still a producer and a programmer and I really care about storytelling getting the value that it creates… I have a personal investment at my ripe old age in leaving a legacy of storytellers getting paid the value for what they’re creating. And as a marketer, I’ve long resented the waste of a panel, the waste of just lazily going after demos. The ability for a marketing dollar to go further is something I’d like to leave behind.

“It would be nice to have my working life swansong be taking a major leap forward and breaking the death grip that a 102-year-old monolith has held on the industry: open it up for price competition, for innovation and for the tactics and data available in 2025. It ain’t easy, but what the heck? I’ve only been doing it my entire working life.”