Nielsen is used to abuse.
“We get punched in the face for obvious reasons,” said Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao. “We’re the referee, we tell the score and people don’t like it – but it comes from a position of strength, and with this acquisition, we’re playing offense.”
The acquisition he’s speaking of is Nielsen’s planned purchase of ad verification company DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion, marking the end of DV’s roughly five-year run as a public company.
The deal, announced last week and set to close in Q1 of next year, sparked immediate debate over whether a verification company can remain truly independent once it’s owned by a measurement company with a stake in the same ecosystem it’s meant to police.
It’s a fair question, Rao said, and one he anticipated. “We gave this a fair amount of thought,” he said, “and I think the story is actually relatively simple.”
