Peter Naylor, a media industry ad sales veteran, will join Nielsen as Chief Customer Officer, a new role for the media measurement giant.
Naylor will serve as an ambassador of sorts to Nielsen’s many customers, including advertisers, video publishers, streamers and broadcasters. Mr. Naylor’s mission is to “ensure the measurement company meets the needs of a wide range of customers, while working with Nielsen’s sales, product and research teams to help our partners strengthen their businesses.” He will report directly to Nielsen CEO Kartik Rao.
“The key to Nielsen’s continued success is working closely with our clients to build the world’s best marketing intelligence platform,” Rao said in a statement. “Peter is the perfect person to support that mission, building on Nielsen’s momentum in big data + panel measurement, live streaming innovation, and our AI transformation. He has led teams across linear TV, streaming and social media. He knows what consumers and clients want and need as behavior continues to evolve. We can’t wait to continue building with him and our partners.”
Naylor has more experience than your typical sales executive. He pivoted to digital advertising expertise early on, joining Hulu in 2014 as senior vice president of advertising. He then led the Americas sales team at Snap, and in 2022 became Netflix’s first vice president of global advertising sales. He left Netflix in 2024, a departure widely seen as a sign that the streaming giant was still new to the advertising market and was pushing for too much pricing and volume for the overall market. Accept the advice of the management team you hire to help you achieve your goals.
Before moving to Hulu, Naylor led NBCUniversal’s digital ad sales team and the sales team behind NBC News’ digital inventory.
“As a Nielsen customer for more than 20 years, I look forward to leveraging my experience to help our clients be even more successful with Nielsen data, and sharing the needs of our partners to develop even better, world-class products at Nielsen,” Naylor said in a statement.
Naylor’s hire comes after a long-running conflict between Nielsen and its major TV clients, and comes as the measurement giant, whose TV ratings remain the basis of most advertising deals in the medium, faces new competition from upstarts such as VideoAmplifier, ComScore and EyeSpot.
Media clients such as Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal have proven active in testing new partnerships with emerging measurement services such as VideoAmp, Comscore, and iSpot. All three companies have gained traction in recent years, not only with television networks but also with some major media buying agencies that buy commercial inventory on behalf of major advertisers.
Still, Nielsen continues to move forward. In January, the company won certification for its big data + panel national audience measurement technology, which is based on information about the number of viewers on smart TV screens as well as the company’s traditional consumer panels. The new data comes from viewer interactions with cable and satellite set-top boxes and smart TVs across 45 million homes and 75 million devices, which Nielsen is distilling to better understand how viewers watch TV and video on linear TV, streaming platforms and mobile devices. This measurement technique is used as the basis for trading in the latest ‘upfront’ advertising sales market and has been at the heart of claims about TV viewership since September.
