• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 23, 2023

Long-time audience measurement exec Chris Wilson has joined startup HyphaMetrics as CEO, succeeding Joanna Drews, who moves to president and co-founder of the panel-based measurement service that hopes to compete directly with Nielsen's TV meter products.

Wilson, who joins from Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Revenue Officer of Comscore, joins HyphaMetrics during a period in which multiple new audience "currency" providers are competing with Nielsen, which also happens to be suing HyphaMetrics via two patent infringement suits.

HyphaMetrics launched in November 2020 with $2 million in venture funding and initially included former GroupM executive Mike Bologna as part of the startup team, but Bologna has since moved on to Brightline.

Wilson left Comscore in August 2022, following a management reorganization related to its acquisition of Sharablee.

"Watching Hypha since its inception over thee years ago, it is clear that this company is up to something special," Wilson writes in a recent LinkedIn post announcing his appointment. "I have been listening to our industry vocalize the need for a solution to precisely quantify how consumers interact with media across the myriad of options that exist today. Hypha can do just that – not to mention faster and more effectively than any existing company. With Hypha, we can finally unify Linear and CTV viewing, Digital and TV behaviors, and provide granular content, advertising, product placement, and brand sponsorship measurement across every viewing option."

He went on to say Hypha uses a "proprietary blend of artificial intelligence, machine learning and computervision to provide a unified understanding of media behavior that evolves at the speed of culture. Our technology measures media the way people experience it – in its dynamic and multifaceted form. The data output, individualized cross-media metrics, serves as the source of truth to the entire media landscape to actualize an interoperable future."

The company has been the subject of not one, but two patent infringement suits filed by Nielsen. One in November 2021, and a more recent one last month.

Its entry into the market comes amid a gold rush of new alternate currency startups vying to compete with Nielsen as an ad industry currency, several of which (iSpot and Videoamp) have already been certified as currencies by NBCUniversal and other big media suppliers.

In June 2021, the Advertising Research Foundation's Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) announced it was partnering with HyphaMetrics to conduct a "Passive TV Measurement Study," but it's unclear if that was ever completed or released.