The Big Story: The Quest For Quality

The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

So you’ve made it to the final day of Advertising Week in New York City. Congratulations.

This year, the annual shindig crammed its attendees into a multiplex near Lincoln Center, one of the last Upper West Side movie theaters that still takes MoviePass.

While previous Advertising Weeks had themes like “storytelling,” there is no theme this year because apparently there’s just too much to talk about. Still, as ad execs wend their way up and down the escalators and through the cinderblock bowels of the cinema, they’re all searching for something similar: quality, transparency and truth in measurement.

Those traits are easier described than found.

Just ask Nielsen – which the AdExchanger team discusses on this week’s “The Big Story.” Nielsen’s panel-based measurement once seemed like the final say, but it has since fallen on hard times, with rumblings of a sale – thanks to the machinations of activist investor Elliott Management.

Senior editor Rae Paoletta took a long look at the problems that led Nielsen to this point – sluggish innovation for both its Buy and Watch businesses, a tremendous amount of debt – to get a sense of the company’s ultimate direction.