Kelly Abcarian: Last News

ISpot.tv, a leading challenger to Nielsen for supremacy in the increasingly fraught TV and streaming ratings business, has received a $325 million investment from Goldman Sachs.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer NBCUniversal has laid off less than 50 employees across three divisions: Peacock marketing, NBCUniversal Entertainment and ad sales. The majority of these cuts, approximately 30 to 40, were made at Peacock as part of a restructuring under CMO Shannon Willett, a source within the company told Variety.

NBCUniversal is expanding its relationship with ad tracking firm iSpot, telling a room full of media buyers today that it will offer the company’s data as official currency starting at its May upfront.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorAs NBCUniversal’s ad-sales division starts to take on tasks beyond its core business, it is expanding the range of communications executives it has as well.Neil Ripley, who previously was head of corporate communications for media-measurement firm Comscore, has been named a vice president of communications for NBCU’s ad-sales unit. He is charged with promoting the division’s efforts around advertising technology, data and cross-platform media measurement.

EXCLUSIVE: NBCUniversal, amazingly, is now in its fifth decade of carrying the Olympic Games. With this month’s Beijing Winter Olympics, though, all of that accumulated institutional knowledge is colliding with a media landscape in massive flux.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorWhile the colorful and grandiose Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony unfurls on TV, the company showing all the pomp has an equally elaborate project taking place off camera.NBCUniversal has been one of the most vocal critics of Nielsen, the company that has for decades measured TV audiences and provided tabulations that serve as the bedrock of ad deals for the nation’s TV networks. To boost its efforts to offer an alternate means of counting the video-watching masses, NBCU is working with more than 30 different advertisers to test a new measurement tool it has built with iSpot.TV — and using the company’s Olympics and looming Super Bowl broadcasts as a sort of test run before trying to get more sponsors to embrace the system during the industry’s annual “upfront” ad-sales season later this year.