Where do I begin? Nielsen is a grind. Compensation is poor, do not expect much, if anything, in the way of merit increases. They believe that working for the Nielsen name should be reward in itself and thus pay below market. Management is full of ex-GE folks, and they execute the GE playbook to the letter, with less than stellar results. They have a bunch of newly minted MBAs running the place (Nielsen likes to find cheap labor at all levels) with no real work experience, whom they rotate around the business in various training opportunities. When it comes time to be accountable for something, lacking real business experience, they fall back on bullying tactics or delegate down the chain until the work goes to some low-level employee who has no ability to execute and gets blamed when things go badly. They do not believe or practice work-life balance, so don’t expect to see any. They treat the Data Acquisition side of their business as a commodity, and take a factory approach to it. If you work in Data Acquisition, expect to be treated like a second class citizen. Since Nielsen acquired Arbitron, Arbitron went from being a gem of a company with stellar data acquisition metrics to extremely poor results as a direct result of the Nielsen folks calling the shots. Arbitron had very mature, analytical and thoughtful leaders who knew how to run a business and manage people to get the most out of them. But the Nielsen folks were the smartest people in the room post-merger, so it was useless to tell them they were sacrificing short term gains at the expense of long term performance. So, for the sake of achieving a $20MM “synergy” target through layoffs, it will likely cost them $20MM or more to fix the damage that was done to performance as a result. Speaking of short term gains, a lot of the “smartest people in the room” in senior leadership left Nielsen shortly after the acquisition of Arbitron, leaving others to clean up the mess and take the blame for abysmal performance, and thus avoiding the stain of failure from appearing on their resumes. I am the world’s biggest believer in Capitalism, but the Nielsen treatment of Arbitron post-merger is an example of the worst of American business, and they are paying the price for incompetent leadership.
