Every Tuesday, one hour after The Thread
TV measurement is a currency. Nobody will audit it.
Billions in television and CTV budget move on numbers that no outside party has checked, produced by companies that grade their own homework and sell the pencil. Unmeasured takes one of those numbers apart every week: where it came from, what it actually counts, and which question the vendor stopped answering.
Three companies. One broadcast. Nobody has to reconcile the difference.
This week
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What lands in your inbox
Four sentences the industry says. Four we checked.
Not a preview. These already ran.
“We're MRC accredited.”
The MRC accredits specific metrics, not companies. It has never accredited a company in its life. Not Zefr, not iSpot, not DoubleVerify, not anybody.
VideoAmp: $6 billion in currency deals.
Two weeks of reporting found nobody who could explain how the figure was built. Thirteen questions went unanswered.
Comscore: an “ROI Strategy” restructuring.
The word layoffs never appears. Executive pay reverts January 1, 2028. The eliminated positions have no such date.
Nielsen: patented, proprietary technology.
A federal court voided all eleven claims using an academic paper about facial expressions that has nothing to do with television.
Also on the beat: what a local advertiser can actually verify about a CTV buy, what a “processed impression” counts, and which measurement company is about to own both the number and the ledger it settles on.
The second voice
Frank has opinions. Frank is also made up.
Frank Kowalczyk is not a real person. On a newsletter about numbers nobody will verify, that seemed like the one claim worth verifying for you up front. Everything he has supposedly sat through is real: the scanner-data years at Nielsen, the Arbitron layoffs, the meeting where "processed impression" got said out loud for the first time. He is a composite of people who were in those rooms and would like to keep working. He shows up in the margins of every issue, including the free part. He is not angry. He is tired, which is worse.
I've been asked to define "reach" in six different jobs and given six different correct answers, all of which were correct at the time and none of which agreed with each other. That's not measurement. That's six people describing the same fog.
Kowalczyk Ratio on this one: 0.31. Ask me later what that means. I haven't fully decided either.
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