With more than 5,000 employees in India accounting for roughly half its global workforce, Nielsen is positioning the country as its primary innovation engine, with Bengaluru serving as its largest hub worldwide, chief technology officer Anil Goel told Moneycontrol.
About 75 percent of the audience measurement and data analytics firm’s global innovation comes from India, including deploying AI to automate advertising intelligence, track brand visibility in sports and measure audiences across a fragmented media landscape.
“We never really designed this (India operations) to be a global capability centre (GCC). We always designed it to be a global innovation centre,” Goel said.
Unlike traditional GCCs where India-based teams work under overseas counterparts, Nielsen’s local teams lead products, make decisions and work directly with global clients, Goel said.
Though India remains a small market in revenue terms, Goel said it is expanding rapidly and ranks among the company’s top 10 growth-potential markets.
Nielsen expects its India presence to expand further following the addition of DoubleVerify, which focuses on advertising verification and brand safety.
Goel said its technology-heavy workforce creates further opportunities to base innovation in India.
AI transforms advertising intelligence
One of the AI’s impact is Nielsen’s advertising intelligence business, which tracks ad expenditure across television, radio, print, magazines and outdoor media in 30–40 major markets, including India and the US.
The company used to rely on a combination of automation and manual work to process information, with more than 1,000 employees handling gaps that the technology could not resolve.
AI and large language models has increased the share of work completed by machines to 97–98 percent from 80-90 percent, Goel said.
The business now needs only a few hundred people for manual intervention.
The change also allows Nielsen to cover a wider range of smaller advertisers and media outlets. “If my systems can handle more, then I can cover more long-tail media,” Goel said.
The company is also using AI to track brand visibility during sporting events. AI has reduced the process of identifying brand placements on player jerseys from frame-by-frame audit to a couple of hours, according to details shared at Nielsen’s Innovation Day in Bengaluru.
The company is working to make this tracking real-time, allowing advertisers to understand brand exposure during a sporting tournament.
Counting same audience across devices
The AI push also extends to Nielsen’s core business of audience measurement, as consumers increasingly move between linear television, connected TV (CTV), streaming services, social media, gaming and mobile devices.
For advertisers, the problem is that each platform can report its own audience numbers, making it difficult to establish how many unique people have been reached across services.
Nielsen is investing in what Goel described as a proprietary identity framework that uses machine-learning models and multiple data signals, including device IDs, IP addresses and email addresses, to determine whether the same audience member is consuming content across different platforms.
Goel said Nielsen has more than 100,000 households in its TV panels, more than one million panels for computer and mobile measurement, and access to data covering more than 70 million homes through first- and third-party sources.
In addition, it is also studying how much time people spend on AI platforms and how these tools influence consumer decisions.
As consumers increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and AI agents begin shaping decisions, the traditional methods of measuring media consumption face new challenges.
Nielsen’s focus is on measuring time share and attention share across AI platforms rather than optimising brand recommendations within AI-generated answers, an area that is still developing, Goel said.
The writer is a Senior Correspondent at Moneycontrol covering media and entertainment, travel and hospitality
Source: Moneycontrol
