Data is the Currency of the 2025 Upfronts

The 2025 Upfronts mark a defining moment for media buying. As brands and agencies prepare for negotiations, powerful new trading currencies have emerged: precision audience data. No longer are age and gender enough to support efficient media investment. This year, the focus is on precision, performance, and power—and that means brands that know how to use data best win.

The Road to Precision Audiences

For decades, US TV advertising has been planned and measured using Nielsen’s TV panel data. Audiences were conceived and measured in very broad terms—think “Adults 18-49”—and media transactions were reckoned using Nielsen’s ratings data as the measurement currency. The size of the Nielsen panel—5,000 households in 2003, expanding to 40,000 households today—meant that planning, buying, and transacting against more granular audiences such as “frozen pizza consumers” or “luxury car intenders” or targets built from product purchase data or from a marketer’s own customer data was difficult to impossible: the size of Nielsen’s viewership data sample was too small to be able to accurately find those audiences. Fusion data combining Nielsen viewership and MRI consumer survey data was the closest marketers could come, enabling some understanding of where certain kinds of audiences could be found across the TV dial, but sample size limitations limited the utility of this dataset to media planning, and the scope to larger TV networks. Actually transacting on granular audiences or on longer-tail networks, simply required larger viewership datasets to make the math work.

Starting in the early 2000s, passively-collected data from millions of cable- and satellite-TV set-top-boxes became available, paving the way for companies like Simulmedia and TRA to be able to find audiences based on precise audience targets across networks of all sizes. Simulmedia’s long history in this area has enabled our clients to find and reach audiences efficiently. However, until recently, even transactions based on precise audience definitions and running on long-tail networks still had no viable alternative to using Nielsen ratings as the transactional currency. Measurement limitations also meant that transacting on outcomes—website visits, product purchase, etc.—was also impossible, despite such transactions becoming common (if not typical) in the world of digital media.

The (Currency) Game Is On!

Nearly five years ago, Nielsen announced Nielsen ONE, its solution to measurement in the cross-platform, cross-device media landscape. The announcement included the statement that Nielsen expected this measurement would ultimately become the foundation of the cross-media buying and selling process, succeeding the current form of TV and digital measurement, no later than the Fall 2024 season. This threw down the gauntlet: Alternative measurement providers had until the 2024-25 TV season to develop new measurement datasets and get them into the marketplace by January 2024, when the planning season for the 2024-25 Upfront would begin to gather momentum. Marketers, agencies, and measurement companies would now, at a minimum, need to adapt their systems, workflows, and business models to adapt to a world with at least two datasets—”Old Nielsen” and “New Nielsen”. This opened the door for other providers of precise audience data to enter the game.

Over the last four years, companies including Comscore, iSpot.tv, Samba.tv, and VideoAmp have brought datasets to market that enable buyers and sellers to begin building confidence in their ability to transact TV on precision audiences. Earlier this year, Nielsen began deploying its “Big Data + Panel” measurement products, which also support planning, trading, and measurement against precision audiences. The combination of upstart and brand-name providers in the precision audience data ecosystem has made advertisers increasingly comfortable with the idea of planning, buying, and even transacting on precision audience datasets.

The Shift to Precision Audiences and Outcomes

Trading TV on precisely-defined audiences or even on business outcomes opens huge efficiency opportunities for marketers, especially in a fragmented ecosystem where viewership continues to shift from linear to CTV. The era of “big TV data” offers significant upside in making TV advertising more efficient compared to using legacy Nielsen panel data:

• Opening up measurement of smaller networks
• Unlocking the ability to plan/optimize/measure against the same precise audiences
• Supporting cross-platform CTV + linear measurement
• Enabling outcome-based measurement in order to prove efficiency

Audience Precision Starts with Good Data

In a world where precision audience data has become currency, marketers who control their audience data have increased leverage in media negotiations. Brands that walk into Upfront negotiations with their CRM data, purchase insights, and modeled audiences have a powerful advantage. They can demand guarantees against their specific targets, measure impact with greater fidelity, and reduce waste.

Furthermore, data-driven negotiations give brands more control over frequency management, cross-channel coordination, and budget optimization. But navigating the intersection of audience data, outcome measurement, and media negotiation is complex. Most marketers need experienced partners to help them navigate this process, and not all providers are ready to support the transition to precision.

How Simulmedia Helps Brands Win with Audience-Based Buying

Simulmedia is built for this moment. With our deterministic TV ad platform, brands can:

• Onboard their first-party data to create custom audience segments.
• Activate cross-channel TV campaigns that reach these audiences across linear and CTV.
• Measure outcomes like website visits, app installs, and in-store sales with precision.
• Optimize in real-time to ensure every dollar delivers maximum performance.

Whether you're a DTC brand looking to scale nationally or an enterprise advertiser managing hundreds of SKUs, Simulmedia enables smarter, data-driven decisions for every media dollar.

Conclusion

As the 2025 Upfronts approach, the transition from generic audiences to precision will be a driving force. Precision audience data is not just a tactic, it's the currency of negotiation. Brands that invest in data, demand outcomes, and embrace audience-based buying will emerge with better deals, stronger performance, and a strategic advantage that lasts well beyond the Upfront season.