• by Wayne Friedman , August 7, 2020

Media measurement and marketing services company Nielsen Holdings witnessed revenues sinking 8% to $1.5 billion in the second quarter due to COVID-19 issues -- in line with expectations. 

Nielsen expects modest declines in the coming periods -- down 2% to 4% in revenues.

The Nielsen Global Media unit, its audience measurement and plan/optimize businesses, slipped 4.3% to $811 million in revenues -- due to U.S. local TV stations' advertising pressures resulting from the pandemic.

Bigger declines hit Nielsen Global Connect, its marketing services unit -- down 10.2% to $685 million. The company witnessed a decline of 7.2% in developed markets and a 15.5% drop in emerging markets. Developed markets are 60% of total Connect revenue.

Nielsen is planning to spin off its Connect unit in the first quarter of 2021.

With regard to its media business, David Kenny, president/chief executive officer, Nielsen, said: “Much of our business in media is contracted and those contracts continue to be honored... There has been projects like efforts around the Olympics and some other sports efforts which obviously were deferred.”

He also notes because auto factories were on hiatus in the second quarter this impacted some of Nielsen’s Gracenote business, which uses ACR technology. Automatic content recognition technology comes from smart TV sets and other connected devices, use for advertising detection and content insertion on live TV.

Nielsen stock closed on Thursday up 2.5% to $15.38.

Tim Nollen, research analyst at Macquarie Capital, said:  “Media investments position Nielsen well to remain the standard for cross-platform measurement... We think patience in the stock will be rewarded as a cleaner media-focused Nielsen emerges.”