Audience measurement, data, and analytics company Nielsen recently announced the addition of Connected TV (CTV) coverage into its Ad Intel product in the UK. The enhancement, which will be available in September, enables ad spend to be tracked across all major streaming platforms, alongside linear TV, digital, and other media types already available.
New Digital Age spoke with Inam Mahmood, General Manager, EMEA, Nielsen, to find out more…
Adding CTV to your Ad Intel product in the UK sounds like a simple thing but I’m sure it wasn’t. How much work has gone into this new launch behind the scenes?
It certainly wasn’t simple! Ad Intel provides a holistic view of the advertising landscape through actionable insights and comprehensive market analysis and empowers advertisers and agencies to strategically allocate their budgets by revealing which channels, content types, and messages resonate most with their target audiences. So with the rapidly expanding CTV market, adding it in was not simply a nice to have, it is a business imperative for our clients to help them unlock critical insight into advertising across this rapidly expanding area.
Of course, as you might expect, it wasn’t just a case of pressing a button and it was included. We have had to develop the ingestion, the processing, and the reporting tools so that we were able to report ad spend and impressions alongside our multimedia databases. We also had to ensure that the coverage adequately represents the UK marketplace as well as the dynamic and always changing list of AVOD suppliers.
We went live in the US in May, but when it comes to EMEA, Germany will launch first for us in August, quickly followed by the UK in September. There will be further roll outs across other international markets towards the end of this year and into 2026.
How complex is the UK marketplace in 2025?
The CTV marketplace is unquestionably complex and also one where double digit growth is being projected well into 2028. However alongside this growth, there’s an already fragmented ecosystem, with a backdrop of the consumption habits of audiences constantly evolving and changing. But this doesn’t need to restrict advertisers, and instead can offer significant opportunities including enhanced targeting capabilities, increased viewership and subsequent ad spend, and also the constant evolution of measurement capabilities allowing for more data-driven optimisation.
Understanding the advertising activities and trends as a whole in this landscape is vital to breaking down the challenges faced. With the right products and tools to do this, competitive intelligence becomes even more valuable than ever before to break through the complexities.
What are advertisers biggest demands at the moment in relation to their investments in CTV inventory?
For advertisers, the biggest demands are around measurability and outcomes. Our recently issued Annual Marketing Report revealed that 56% of global marketers reported a planned increase on over-the-top OTT/CTV spend. Naturally, with an increase in spend comes a greater need for positive outcomes and even more effectiveness, which requires robust and consistent measurement, particularly when it comes to reach, frequency, and viewability.
Also on the minds of advertisers is contextual relevance and brand suitability. They are increasingly concerned about where their ads appear, so as they are not in unsuitable environments, or around content that could be perceived as divisive in society.
Finally, when it comes to advanced targeting and personalisation, AI is top of mind for advertisers at present. They expect AI to enhance their audience identification, to optimise ad spend and bidding strategies, and to ensure the best creative reaches specific viewers in real-time.
What are their biggest challenges?
There are some significant challenges when it comes to CTV, which can hinder the opportunities to capitalise on the platform’s potential. Principally, the CTV ecosystem is massively fragmented. There are countless streaming services, apps, and devices with platforms operating with their own proprietary data and identifiers. This leads to a lack of measurement standards making it challenging to compare performance across campaigns and truly understand the benefits of cross-platform activity. Again, our Annual Marketing Report uncovered that the majority of marketers are struggling to bring digital and traditional channels into a holistic measurement framework – only 32% of marketers globally say they measure their media spending holistically across both digital and traditional channels.
Therefore, there is a need for effective cross-media measurement solutions in a constantly changing world. To meet these challenges head-on requires the industry to come together, to collaborate, and embrace technological innovations, whilst also understanding the need for unified, transparent, and independent solutions for data and measurement in the CTV space.
Are there any marketplace trends bubbling under at the moment that you think will become more important?
For me, unquestionably, the main trend is the rise of Retail Media Networks (RMN). We know from our research that RMN will play a growing role in media strategies this year and this rise will be one of the most significant and transformative trends in advertising and ecommerce over the next few years. RMN will fundamentally change how brands are reaching and targeting consumers, how retailers generate revenue, and how the data that we have from consumers is leveraged. With further offsite expansion, and the even bigger role to be played by AI when it comes to ad delivery and personalisation, RMNs are creating a profound shift between retailers and consumers.
