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Nielsen’s RealEyes partnership offers an outcomes measurement solution
By Michael Bürgi • August 1, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
Give Nielsen some credit — although its Big Data Plus Panel measurement initiative this year has been fraught with problems for agencies using it to determine their upfront investments, they are using it, and it does represent the measurement company’s efforts to move just beyond panels. In fact, it almost feels to some observers like there’s a culture shift happening where once the company was intransigent about change.
On Thursday, Nielsen announced the first of what are expected to be a few moves toward determining outcomes in media consumption, as the industry aims to get a better idea of what advertising actually works rather than just whether viewers saw the ads.
Via a partnership with measurement firm RealEyes, Nielsen describes its Outcomes Marketplace as “an interoperable ecosystem for partner measurement that will bring together a diverse set of key brand, sales, attention and conversion metrics within the Nielsen ONE platform for the first time,” according to information provided by the firm.
It’s meant to enable advertisers to “have a more comprehensive view of an ad’s outcome alongside reach and frequency data,” the latter of which has long been Nielsen’s bread and butter. As Nichole Henderson, Nielsen’s gm of global campaign analytics, put it, Outcomes Marketplace represents the ability “to measure what truly matters: real business results.”
In other words, applying RealEyes’ ad scoring to Nielsen’s output aims to predict brand sales outcomes, as well as media cost efficiency on social and video platforms. RealEyes’ insights are derived out of a base of 200 million accessible respondents and 17 million humans watching across ads in 85 countries.
The effort, according to Nielsen, already has signed up influencer firm Captiv8, which Publicis just moved to acquire last week, given that the insights this effort throws off can help with determining the effectiveness of influencers and creators.
“Nielsen’s attention metrics raise the bar for influencer marketing,” said Krishna Subramanian, CEO at Captiv8, in a statement. “We’ve always pushed for deeper, more meaningful measurement and now we can go beyond surface-level metrics to show real campaign impact. It’s a major step forward for brands investing in creators.”
Ironically, the partnership offers more insight into the effectiveness of creative — not historically Nielsen’s strong suit. As Max Kalehoff, RealEyes’ chief growth officer, sees it, the move represents “overdue recognition of the importance of ad creative in driving business results. Nearly every measurement firm and authority has proven for years that ad creative is the biggest driver of campaign outcomes, especially sales. After so many years of the industry over-indexing on audience targeting and impression counting, the pendulum is swinging to recognize the largest lever that influences business results and sales.”
As attention works its way into figuring out the impact of advertising, all the firms will likely find some way to benefit.
“It’s exciting to see Nielsen take a more open stance to data partnerships and we’re happy to see our friends at RealEyes blazing a trail with their best-in-class creative attention measurement tech,” said Marc Guldimann, CEO and founder of metrics firm Adelaide. “Open ecosystems like Nielsen ONE will benefit brands, agencies and publishers alike.”
RealEyes and Nielsen started working together last December, when Nielsen added RealEyes’ capabilities and creative analysis to Nielsen’s campaign analytics suite. This announcement, Kalehoff explained, is essentially the first payoff – the result of months of product and data development between the two companies.
In other words, stay tuned — it seems there’s more outcomes-related news to come out of Nielsen and the attention firms.
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