iWorld
Nielsen, Experian expand agreement to enhance identity demographics
Mumbai: Nielsen and Experian have announced an expanded strategic initiative to enhance identity data in the United States for digital measurement of the open web. Experian marketing data assets will enhance the Nielsen Identity System by providing persistent IDs for open web measurement, increasing coverage and interoperability by supporting audience measurement across screens and devices that are consistent and comparable.
Forthcoming cookie deprecation is fundamentally changing the advertising ecosystem. Combined with the deterioration of other digital identifiers, there’s greater emphasis on people-first measurement approaches to accurately count and deduplicate audiences across platforms as well as report on a person’s characteristics, thus addressing advertising waste and fraud.
Integrating Experian marketing data assets into the Nielsen ID System will further strengthen Nielsen’s ability to match person-level data to devices, increasing the scale and accuracy of demographic distribution for reported impressions for Nielsen’s Audience Measurement and Outcomes products.
Advertisers and publishers can use Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) with more confidence knowing the solution leverages a variety of best-in-class data sources that are aimed towards appropriately assigning and deduplicating audience demographics across devices, content and ad exposure. This initiative builds on the two companies’ longstanding relationship where Nielsen is already leveraging demographic data from Experian in Connected TV DAR services.
As part of the Nielsen ID System, the Nielsen ID Graph links billions of first and third party signals which are calibrated against, and validated by, Nielsen’s people-based panels and truth sets. This joint initiative will further position Nielsen to scale its ID Resolution System and deliver deduplicated audiences across linear and digital platforms as part of NielsenOne, its cross-media measurement solution.
“This expanded agreement with Experian immediately enriches Nielsen’s Identity System in the US, and showcases our commitment to independent measurement and marketplace interoperability,” said Nielsen chief data and research officer Mainak Mazumdar. “This is an important milestone as we continue to evolve our technologies and methodologies as we move toward NielsenOne, underpinning a strong digital measurement capability which helps with the vision of a true cross-platform that measures across all screens.”
“Experian’s goal is to enable privacy-forward identity in the marketing ecosystem, helping brands build smarter audience strategies and powering more robust cross-platform measurement,” said Experian Marketing Services SVP – strategy and partnerships Aimee Irwin. “We are excited to expand our longstanding strategic partnership with Nielsen, bringing addressability at scale through connectivity and interoperability across the ever evolving identity landscape.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
