Do I see myself leaving Nielsen someday? Possibly, yes, but it would be as a result of the company's health if they can't right the ship. For a self-titled "technology company", Nielsen leaves a lot to desired across multiple levels, which is frustrating because I want the company to do well. Developing measurement capabilities is incredibly difficult, and I don't want to understate that, but I wish we were pushing the gas pedal even harder on measurement capabilities. TV is dying; so, too, eventually will much of our revenue. If we can't get digital right, then Nielsen is going to become quickly irrelevant, and much of pro #1 is going to dissipate for me.
Also, a huge con is that Nielsen is already suffering financially, with no immediate end in sight. Layoffs, reorgs, the mad scramble to hit impossible revenue targets-it gets wearying. There are a lot of reasons why Nielsen isn't doing well, but one area that jumps out at me and frustrates me to no end is our technology (beyond measurement). Some of our products are, well, terrible. If you have to hire people to pull reports for clients because your products are so hard to use (there are -many- teams that do just this), it's arguable whether money might be better spent on improving the product? Relatedly, even in my department alone, there are a ton of things that could just be straight-out automated. Why should someone spend a week on highly canned decks that can be populated by a script in less than a minute? When Nielsen considers how to trim the fat, there's plenty of fat in inefficiency that never seems to be trimmed and should be. Throwing people at problems that should really be solved with technology is a recurring theme and one we need to be careful of.
