David Kenny
Chief Executive Officer at Nielsen
Good morning. And thank you for joining the call today. I'd like to start by saying that we are deeply concerned about the evolving situation in the Ukraine. We are focused on the safety of our 107 employees and their families there. We've mobilized a team to help them navigate through this challenging time.
Turning now to 2021 results, I am extremely proud of everyone in the Nielsen organization. Our teams executed and delivered strong results in 2021 despite facing some unanticipated challenges. We successfully sold Nielsen Global Connect. We hit significant product milestones. We executed all of our original key 2021 guidance metrics, revenue, adjusted EBITDA margins and free cash flow. The clearest measure of our success is our ability to deliver mid single-digit organic revenue growth over time.
In 2021, we delivered organic revenue growth of 4.9% and we continue to expect mid single-digit organic revenue growth in 2022 and beyond. The drivers of our revenue growth give us confidence that we are delivering the diversification and innovation needed to accelerate growth over the next few years. Growth in the digital products is far outpacing the average in measurement and Gracenote is growing in the high single-digits, both reflecting our opportunities as consumers shift to streaming. The six largest US media companies, some of our most vocal critics, in aggregate grew faster in 2021 than in the prior few years as they added Nielsen's Digital Solutions and growth outside the United States accelerated to 7% and will remain strong, driven by adoption of Nielsen's Digital Solutions.
This morning, we announced that our Board approved a $1 billion share repurchase authorization. This reflects the Board's confidence in both our short and long-term growth and the view that our shares represent an attractive investment opportunity. Our significantly improved balance sheet provides us with the flexibility to return more capital to shareholders, while continuing to invest in organic growth initiatives and pursue strategic tuck-in M&A if and when it makes sense.
We've recognized there's been a lot of noise recently largely focused on our measurement of the declining US linear TV audience. I want to separate the noise from reality. I'll frame my remarks around five key points. I'll then touch on impacting content before Linda reviews the financial results and 2022 guidance.
First, Nielsen won our cross-media measurement solution uniquely aligned with the needs of advertisers and their agencies and they will ultimately choose the currency for ad spending. Second, media companies need to be digital or streaming-first to keep pace with audience behavior. Our relevance with leading digital-first players is growing and we are adding increased value to traditional TV clients as they shift to streaming. Third, we are uniquely committed to measuring people, not just machines. Fourth, we are making the right investments in data, methods and quality. And fifth, we're executing on Nielsen ONE. We hit all of our 2021 milestones. We're on track to deliver the full solution later this year and begin driving industry adoption.
I'll now expand on each of these points. First, advertisers and their agencies will ultimately choose the currency for cross-media ad spending and they want a solution that is trusted, independent and complete. Advertisers want to reach the people who buy their products at a frequency that build brand image and this means more streaming for most advertisers. Therefore, they want a solution that brings streaming and linear together. The World Federation of Advertisers laid out a set of requirements which were further adapted by The Association of National Advertisers in the United States. The approach is clear about big data, direct integration, interoperability, the targeting in attribution solutions and empirical validation with panel data. Nielsen ONE uniquely aligned with all of those requirements.
It's also worth noting that the ANA is explicitly not trying to create a new currency. Importantly, advertisers and their agencies want to transact on one foundational currency that reflects in one number as close to 100% of the media and 100% of the people watching it. This is Nielsen ONE, which will leverage all of the many points where we are embedded in media planning and buying systems.
Second, the media industry has shifted to digital-first and Nielsen's business is aligned with this. Our relevance is growing with both digital-first clients as well as traditional TV clients who are shifting towards streaming.
I've to remind you that every major change to expand media measurement has been met with resistance and headlines. This dates back to adding cable to broadcast in the 1990s and the addition of delayed viewing on a DVR in 2006. The latest move, the current move to reconcile streaming and linear is perhaps the biggest change in the history of Media. Friction can be expected and we are seeing it. Our gauged data shows that streaming reached an all-time high in January, now accounting for 38% of viewing within the 18 to 54 age demographics.
Leading streaming-first platforms recognized the value of having a common metric for audiences as linear TV and digital converge and no other third-party measurements is as valued as Nielsen across the digital ecosystem. Google recently cited measurement as a key to their success in connected TV. This year, Google is hosting YouTube Brandcast, their advertising showcase, during the week of the upfront, which historically has been a TV-centric week. Google is using Nielsen data to demonstrate the strength and relevance of their platform. Also ahead of this year's upfront, Roku announced that they're adding Nielsen's digital ad ratings as an audience guarantee, making Roku the first ad-buying platform to launch Nielsen guarantees across streaming televisions.
Most of our top digital-first clients now also buy our TV data. A recent example of that is our renewed TV license agreement with The Trade Desk. Yes, there is more noise on the traditional TV side as our clients adjust their business models from linear to streaming. But privately, the conversations we have with clients and their contracts with us show that our business with them is much more productive than [Technical Issues] suggest. We grew revenue with national media clients in the double-digits in the fourth quarter and high-single digits for the full year.
2021 revenue growth was driven by strong pricing, strong uptake of our digital solutions and cross-selling of our three essential solutions. And in fact, our growth accelerated from what we saw pre-pandemic in 2019. We expect continued solid growth with these clients going forward. It's worth noting that Nielsen renewed 100% of our top 10 contracts over the last three years, 100%. Internationally, accelerated growth is driven in part by the adoption of our digital offerings. We are expanding digital and cross-media in key markets around the world, including Mexico, Australia, Poland, Thailand, Denmark and Hong Kong.
Third, we are uniquely committed to measuring people in a way that is scaled and representative. We measured people not just devices because people and not machines are who watches video. Nielsen is the only company with a high-quality probability sample for measuring video and the only company that can backup our measurement with large scale empirical evidence. Our big data sets are validated by the behaviors of over 100,000 people in our panel, which uniquely allows us to provide person's level measurement that is representative of all audiences, that is validated and audited.
Unvalidated machine data often produces inflated audience estimates. While machines expand the population is not growing and neither is time, it's still 24 hours a day. So we uniquely measure the share of total time across total people. Machines cannot tell you who is watching. There are serious deficiencies in models that are not tested with empirical evidence. Some in the industry aggregate machines in the household and then use household averages to guesstimated viewer demographics. Others use credit data models, which are biased towards affluent consumers. Some use panels as small as 100 households, which is clearly statistically insufficient for validation.
Fourth, we are making the right investments in data, method and quality to remain the best measure of how all people consume all media. And we do this at a scale and specificity greater than anyone else. We're integrating set-top box and ACR data from roughly 30 million households into our national TV measurement. Set-top box data provides valuable insight into consumption by a cable and satellite subscription. That said, nearly half of all households no longer have a set-top box. We expect cord-cutting to continue. So we're focused on connected TV data, which we believe will be more resilient over time.
During 2021, we doubled the number of connected TV partners, which enable us to measure 75% of CTV media spend. Our coverage includes Hulu, Amazon, Roku, YouTube, VIZIO Watchfree and Samsung TV Plus. When we include PCs and mobile devices, we cover 87% of total video digital spend. We covered 19 of the top streaming platforms, which together represent approximately 90% of streaming usage. We also have more data scientists than the next five players combined in the audience measurement space. This is 500 experts leading continued innovations. In fact, Nielsen is the clear innovation leader in media measurement. In 2021, we were issued over 230 US patents, keeping pace with prior years. We also released significant contributions to over a dozen major open first [Phonetic] projects in the cloud computing and analytic spaces.
And finally, we are executing as planned, as committed on Nielsen ONE. We are uniquely positioned to lead the industry into the next-generation of audience measurement.
Let me review our roadmap that we shared at Investor Day in 2020 and highlight what we accomplished in 2021. Walking across the top, we completed the transformation of our digital methodology. We rolled out our ID resolution system, including our cookie-less approach. Toward that end, we entered into a global strategic partnership with The Trade Desk, which scales our identity system globally and we became a preferred measurement partner of The Trade Desk. This morning, we also announced an agreement to integrate Experian Marketing data assets into our identity system in the United States.
We're integrating Always-On measurement into Roku's ad-buying platform, as I mentioned before, and we're focused on Always-On measurement with other digital platforms. We enhanced our metering technology and expanded our partnership with Extreme Reach to enable subminute reporting for greater comparability across linear and digital. And we announced our plan for individual commercial metrics in November.
Going across the bottom, we have streaming meters installed in nearly half of our panel homes. We're adding them into new panel homes as we recruit desk. We doubled our CTV partners and we increased the coverage of MVPDs and digital distributors. We completed our rebuild of direct first-party integrations with the two leading digital agile. And just last week, we released impact data for the inclusion of Big Data into National TV measurement. In alignment with client feedback, we'll launch Big Data as a standalone service in September in parallel with the existing currency. Clients who are ready to transact on new more robust metrics will be able to do so this fall.
We're adding addressable measurement, which is still fairly small. We're working with addressable providers to help them scale and drive adoption. In January, we moved to impression-based buying in local in conjunction with the inclusion of broadband-only homes into measurement. This is an important step in moving local to the same Nielsen ONE measurement as Digital and National.
Altogether, we accelerated our roadmap and launched Nielsen ONE Alpha, the first iteration of Nielsen ONE ads in January, ahead of schedule. Alpha is specific to ad campaign and gives clients an initial look at the user interface as well as audience deduplication across all screens, adding in CTV for the first time in addition to linear TV, computer and mobile. Alpha engages the trailblazing advertisers, agencies and media sellers who are shaping the cross-media marketplace. Alpha includes companies like Kimberly-Clark, Disney and Magna.
In fact, every major agency holding company is now engaged with Alpha. We have received positive feedback on Alpha, clients like the utility and the interface of Nielsen ONE. We've also given a suggestion. Given the growing role of first-party data in our agency partners' cross-media strategies, we are prioritizing the measurement of audiences upon agent gender, including first-party audiences in 2022.
Our early discussions with advertisers also highlighted the importance of tying reach and frequency to outcome an attribution. Accordingly, we are accelerating opportunities to integrate data from our suite of impact marketing solutions into Nielsen ONE later this year. The foundation for Nielsen ONE is squarely in place. By the end of this year, we'll share impact data for Nielsen ONE, which will provide the industry with a two-year parallel period before we fully transition to cross-media metrics by the fall 2024 season.
I'd like to point out that Nielsen ONE is more than a new currency for ad buying. After Nielsen ONE Ads, we will launch Nielsen ONE Content that will provide studios, distributors and streaming platforms unprecedented insight into cross-screen consumption and will launch Nielsen ONE Planning, which will empower agency and in-house media buyers to effectively forecast and plan cross-media native campaigns.
Behind this, Nielsen has always stood for gold-standard quality. We've taken significant steps to improve quality control to meet the MRC accreditation standards and drive sustained quality improvements. We identified with the MRC success criteria required for re-accreditation and we expect to complete all necessary action items by mid-year, after which, we expect the MRC members to vote on accreditation. We have reached our goal of 41,000 homes in the panel in 2021 and will reach our target of 41,600 by the end of this quarter. Only Nielsen has a scaled, representative, empirical person-level panels. And beyond panel quality, we are also focused on the highest standards for data quality controls, tech-resilience and client communications.
Let me turn to outcomes, which we rebranded as Impact Marketing Solutions. Our portfolio spans pre-flight advertising intelligence and cross-platform media planning, in-flight audience activation and post-flight advertising effectiveness measurement. Let me cite a few examples of how we are expanding to include all media, all major markets and all major advertisers. We launched campaign measurement in 40 new markets. We strengthened our capabilities in automotive through a new partnership with pulp. We broadened our advertising intelligence offering to include paid social media ad spend.
We expanded our upper funnel brand impact solutions with digital publishers like Spotify, TikTok, Twitter and others. We expanded coverage in our planning and optimization solution to include streaming data from connected TVs. And as a point of external validation, Forrester's Q1 recent Marketing Measurement And Optimization Solutions Wave Report said that Nielsen "provides advanced marketing performance insights with audience activation in a one-stop-shop for advertisers". This report is widely used by advertisers when they evaluate vendors and it's further validation that we are creating value for them.
Let me turn to Gracenote, our content solutions pillar. The Gracenote ID is the UPC code for video, sports and music content. Gracenote is the market leader in entertainment metadata worldwide. The Gracenote content identifiers or Gracenote IDs are widely deployed throughout the media ecosystem enabling cross platform linkage and universal search across video content. Content spend continues to grow rapidly and we had new opportunities to help distributors better manage their catalog to connect with and grow their audiences.
We are leveraging audience measurement data and Gracenote metadata together with the continued build-out of our analytics offering. This includes the recent launch of Audience Predict, which enables data-driven decision-making around the content acquisition and distribution. In 2022, we're focused on further growing Gracenote's geographic footprint, we're focused on expanding the usage of the Gracenote ID and launching new products to help distributors analyze, benchmark and derive insight from their catalog.
To sum up, Nielsen delivered strong results in 2021. Nielsen has an unmatched position delivering value to clients across our three essential solutions. We are digital-first and global-first. That strategy aligns with the evolving media landscape. We are on track to deliver Nielsen ONE later this year and we do remain positioned -- best positioned to lead the industry forward with cross-media measurement.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Linda to review the financials.
