Can Nielsen keep up? Karthik Rao on adapting to a fragmented media landscape

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: In an era where media consumption is more fragmented than ever, Nielsen, a company that has long been synonymous with audience measurement, finds itself in a race to keep up. Karthik Rao, chief executive of Nielsen, acknowledges the reality check: “The revelation was not about the media landscape—it was about what we need to do to keep pace and get ahead.

The velocity to keep up is probably the single biggest challenge." Despite growing competition and big tech firms consolidating audience data, Nielsen still holds relevance, according to Rao. "We provide the best measure of what audiences are doing in terms of consuming content and ads. We provide the best metadata to create discovery experiences.

Those things endure. However, with the amount of fragmentation in experiences, the need for us to keep up is very high." Also Read | JioHotstar partners with Nielsen for third-party ad measurement starting IPL The rise of the creator economy is a prime example of how audience consumption has shifted. “Even three to five years ago, we weren’t talking about the creator economy at scale.

But today, independent creators—one-man studios, one-woman studios—are hugely influential. If you think about the US elections, you see how powerful this model is, across video and audio. We need to measure all forms of media that people spend time with.

That’s where we are evolving," Rao told Mint. Rao, who operates out of the company's New York headquarters, is in India to inaugurate new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Rao acknowledges that Nielsen has historically been perceived as a measurement company but is now actively shifting its identity.