Welcome to The TV Room. Your weekly digest of television, streaming, and digital media insights that matter.

This week we're covering:

• 📺 Nielsen and Paramount Hash it Out

• 💖 Tinder Says It’s Great to Be Wrong

• 🎥 Creative Spotlight: Oatly - “Update Milk: Holiday Edition”

• 🧒 Gen Z Snuffs Loyalty

Paramount's Messy Breakup Signals Shake-Up

The TV industry's long-standing relationship with Nielsen is showing serious cracks. Paramount Global and the ratings giant remain locked in a heated contract dispute that has dragged on since October 1st.

In the latest escalation, Nielsen has removed Paramount's data from its Media Information Tape - the key tool advertising agencies use to verify that their ad buys hit their targets. While Nielsen says it will continue measuring Paramount's content, agencies now have restricted access to that valuable data.

The core issue? Money and value.

Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao claims Paramount is demanding a "nearly 50% reduction" in pricing, while Paramount argues Nielsen's costs have "quintupled" over parts of its business - in some cases exceeding the total ad revenue of the networks being measured.

This dispute highlights the broader industry shift happening in TV measurement:

• 2 in 3 advertisers believe multiple measurement currencies are the future

• 60% of advertisers used alternative measurement providers in the past year

• Most agree the market needs a shortlist of ~5 key providers

Paramount has already switched to VideoAmp as its interim measurement partner and says it's prepared to make that permanent. Nielsen argues that VideoAmp's unaccredited data "lacks the precision" for broadcast TV and live sports measurement.

The stakes are high - Nielsen's data helps determine where billions in ad dollars flow. But TV networks have long complained the company hasn't kept pace with the streaming era. In 2021, Nielsen lost its national accreditation after undercounting pandemic viewership.

While both sides say they're open to a deal, this public spat could accelerate the industry's move toward a multi-currency future - though completely breaking free from Nielsen's decades-long dominance may prove easier said than done.

Read More:

• Nielsen Pulls Paramount Data From Advertiser Analysis Tool as Contract Dispute Drags On - The Wrap

[Webinar] TV Advertising, Reimagined

Welcome to the future of TV advertising! As digital transformation and streaming shift consumer behavior, traditional TV has become costly and harder to measure, leading many brands to redirect ad budgets to digital channels with clearer, outcome-based metrics.

When:
Tuesday, January 14th, 10:00 AM PST | 1:00 PM EST

Webinar:
TV 2.0–Drive Better Outcomes with the Next Evolution in TV Advertising

Why Attend?

• Leverage TV 2.0’s advanced capabilities to precisely target audiences and measure success.

• Activate campaigns with a platform that uses AI-driven optimization for improved ROI.

• Maximize both top and bottom-of-funnel results through non-skippable, in-view ads reaching 100M U.S. households.

• Prepare for the future of TV advertising and gain a competitive edge by learning from early adopters

🎙️ Jason Fairchild on Performance TV

In this episode, Jason Fairchild, CEO and co-founder of tvScientific, talks about lessons from OpenX, creating the performance TV category, and whether big players like The Trade Desk and AppLovin might enter the space.

Jason shares how CTV can shift ad dollars from search and social by focusing on transparency and measurable outcomes, while exploring the challenges of building a new adtech category and the future of CTV advertising.

What You’ll Learn:

• 📊 Shifting Ad Dollars: How tvScientific is moving budgets from search and social to CTV.

• 🖥️ Transparent Results: Why advanced attribution tools matter for advertisers.

• 📈 The Future of CTV: How brand and performance advertising are converging on CTV.

TV Industry Updates

• Interactive TV revolution: Fubo introduced new ad formats designed to shift consumer behavior from second-screen to direct TV transactions.

• Agency mega-merger: Omnicom and IPG have merged into one company, potentially limiting innovation but opening doors for smaller players.

• Wrong about Tinder: The dating app launched a cheeky new campaign acknowledging skepticism with the slogan "It's great to be wrong about Tinder."

• Verification evolution: CTV ad verification is shifting from risk avoidance to value creation, with 17% of marketers adopting positive engagement solutions.

• Streaming milestone: The UK streaming ad market surpassed £1 billion, now representing 30% of the TV ad market just two years after Netflix introduced ads.

Stay up to date on the latest in TV advertising by joining our Slack community!

Creative Spotlight: Oatly - “Update Milk: Holiday Edition”

Oatly's "Update Milk: Holiday Edition" campaign cleverly disrupted the traditional milk-and-cookies-for-Santa narrative by repurposing vintage content and conducting a playful Santa taste test to promote their plant-based alternative.

The Details:

• The campaign featured modified '80s Polaroid commercials where Oatly digitally replaced dairy milk with oat milk and suggested leaving croquembouche instead of cookies for Santa

• A 69-second film showcased 31 professional Santas participating in a strategically staged taste test between traditional milk and cookies versus Oatly and croquembouche

• Creative execution maintained Oatly's signature style of crudely inserting their product and voiceovers into existing content

What We Loved: The campaign brilliantly leaned on nostalgia and humor while challenging a holiday tradition, making their message memorable and culturally relevant.

Marketing Mix

• AI's next chapter: Marketing leaders predict AI will reshape how brands interact with consumers in 2025, with a focus on incremental progress.

• Gen Z loyalty shift: The "Great Wealth Transfer" and declining brand loyalty among Gen Z are transforming how legacy brands must earn trust in 2025.

• Brand insights upgrade: Google Ads rolls out a new Brand Report dashboard, with a unified view of campaign performance with deduplicated reach metrics.

• Attribution evolution: Media mix modeling makes a comeback as incrementality testing emerges as a key measurement strategy for 2025.

• Commercial creativity debate: The advertising industry grapples with using generative AI collaboration while maintaining creative quality and intentionality.

The TV Room is your go-to source for staying ahead in the world of television and digital media. Want to chat about these stories with other industry pros? Join our Slack channel to continue the conversation.