There has been a huge GCC based layoff in India today, laid off employees in India were given decent severance but they were immediately escorted out of the office with security guards.
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@1te @1ps here. Absolutely agree on the CBET and PPM tech survivability, detection and cost. But, they knew.....simply could not throw themselves under the bus by acknowledging it. They new as far back as the joint venture explorations. However, especially due to combining the engineering staff and teamwork, a lot of good work happened post 2014, in spite of the blocks in place from certain legacy Nielsen management types. And self serving politics.
Arbitron PPM w/CBET was superior in execution and costs to Nielsen's tech. The execs were too busy firing Arbitron employees in 2014 to notice so they overspent using inferior tech for over 10 years.
Nielsen "leaders" have never done anything but fire people and label it efficiency and productivity improvements. The company can't die soon enough.
@r4 Nielsen has been watermarking tv audio with both legacy watermarking AND the addition of "radio" Arbitron CBET for PPM for some time. Using the PPM bluetooth to determine in vs out of home. All they are doing here is adding the CBET code detections from the newer radio measurement wearable into a sample for TV. Old tech, new use.
State of the Art + Wearable Devices have no place in the same sentence together with audience measurement, especially when administered by Nielsen. Apple maybe, but gutter dwelling Nielsen? Not a chance.
@r4, right, I want to see who in the world is going to wear that (besides just those that need the little money that Nielsen pays). This has been true for a while now, Nielsen panels IS NOT an example of any demographic anymore, only those that need the money will participate and now you're telling me they want to compete against Apple Watch and similar LOL!
Pilot To Launch with Super Bowl LX on February 8 and Continue with High Profile Live Events, Entertainment and Sports
Nielsen to Use State of the Art Wearable Devices to More Accurately Capture Shared Viewing
New York – February 3, 2026 – Nielsen, a global leader in audience measurement, data and media intelligence, today announced that it is piloting a new methodology enhancement to more accurately account for co-viewing. This will better reflect the total viewership for programming – in particular LIVE events.
@qc, they won't be measuring the SuperBowl this year but that alternative MAGA thing full of pedos and brainless people. This is how you make money in today's America!
With this round of layoffs will the SuperBowl reports be OK?
“Wait for things to start breaking and no one knows how to solve the problem!“
Ummm … wait for? That’s been the Nielsen business model for years, only elevated now with cheap offshore labor … that’s also getting the axe now too.
This “AI-driven automation” is proving to be largely performative. Teams are handed systems they can’t operate autonomously and are left scrambling when problems emerge.
A handful of critical SMEs will probably stay — simply because without them, things would fall apart.
The story being sold to support this strategy doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s fragile at best.
Notably, even many people in the GCC seem openly dissatisfied with the current leadership direction.
Apparently they are going to layoff existing SMEs from US, global too(whatever left) in another round through feb-march and among GCC, they had gone on a crazy hiring spree...many from that lot plus existing people were laid off. It begs the question what tech leadership is going to do, apart from making fat paychecks for themselves. The leadership is clueless when it comes to measurement which is the core business of Nielsen. Everything relies on AI, interns and some semi technical managers, AI dependent architects, developers.
Entire Nielsen departments now have no devs, or no QA, no one with the true knowledge to hire more because those people were part of previous US layoffs. This fu---n clown car of a company.
I had my US job replaced by a GCC. It su-ks. But it also su-ks to be hired at a GCC for pennies and be actually good at your job and get cut anyway due to this madness. Nielsen LOSES money in onboarding new people.
Well if it’s two things Nielsen excels at: treating people like sh-t no matter where you live, and wasting massive amounts of dollars.
Appears to be almost a 40% reduction in the Tech org. Entire teams have been eliminated. Reason being given is automation due to AI, but this is BS. Things have definitely not been automated enough, and the few remaining folks are expected to pick up all the work. Wait for things to start breaking and no one knows how to solve the problem!
@a6 it happened in Tech/Data Science
which department?
Layoffs are all Nielsen executives know.