Ciaran O'Kane dusts off his pencil and sketches out what the newly-combined Nielsen and DoubleVerify means for the ad tech industry...

Over the past 12 months you might have seen some MadTech Sketches about the rise of the Super Signal Aggregator (SSA). It's the TLA that launched a thousand startup and private equity roll-up pitch decks. With the recent Nielsen and DoubleVerify deal, it has returned with a vengeance.

I have read lukewarm commentary on the acquisition since it was announced. A lot of reductive thinking around an unloved public company being taken private; two disparate assets merged to satisfy a tired PE playbook. But this deal is potentially bigger than that...

The Nielsen + DV tie up has given us, by accident or by design, the ultimate SSA. By retrofitting the Nielsen reach signal - and measurement - into the DoubleVerify SSA framework, you have the dominant player in this burgeoning category. 

In this edition of the MadTech Sketch, we look at the Nielsen/DoubleVerify SSA. This will, of course, be a topic of conversation at the upcoming ATS London event on September 15 - final tickets available now.