Nielsen 2024 ESG Report: Driving a Healthy Business with Inclusive Practices

Our purpose is to power a better media future for all people! Watch Nicolina Marzicola and Sandra Sims-Williams share how Nielsen’s inclusive practices drive a healthy and resilient business. 

Learn more in our annual global corporate sustainability report. 

What do you think is unique about Nielsen’s culture? 

Sandra: What makes Nielsen special is our focus on inclusion and representation, ensuring that everyone’s voices are heard as decisions are made in the media and advertising industries. These industries are powerful forces that help all of us understand other people and experiences. Nielsen and its employees around the world continue to have a central role to play—using our insights to foster that understanding externally, and making business decisions to drive a representative and inclusive culture internally.

What drew you to join Nielsen as Chief People Officer in February 2024? What do you see as Nielsen’s advantages and challenges related to our people? 

Nicolina: I was excited to join Nielsen for two primary reasons: its integrity and its history. For over 100 years, Nielsen has been a global leader in audience measurement, data and analytics, shaping the future of media. And to do that well, Nielsen has to operate as a high-integrity company, committed to its values and ideals. As we transform our business and shift our geographic footprint where our employees are based, we are working to ensure that we continue to infuse that sense of history, integrity, passion and purpose within all our employees, no matter how long or short a time they’ve been with Nielsen.

How does Nielsen’s approach to inclusion, both internally and externally, continue to evolve?

Sandra: When we operate in a culture that is inclusive, innovation flourishes, our clients win and employees are engaged and collaborate to bring the best that Nielsen can offer to the communities we measure. Diversity, equity and inclusion are truly harnessed when they are fully integrated into the work we do every day—from the programs we create to support and develop our teams, to the ways in which we serve our clients and communities. This year, as we’re transforming, we’re dialing up our focus on inclusion and belonging even more, to ensure that everyone feels they can bring their full selves to their work. We recently renamed our team from DE&I to Business Inclusion, Impact and Belonging (BIIB), which better captures all that our team delivers for the benefit of our people, our clients and our communities. And with our team now working as part of the People team, we’re excited for our business leaders to see how this work connects to our employee experience and the cultural transformation we need to drive.

How is Nielsen supporting its people—especially managers—through continuous transformation and transitions? 

Nicolina: We’re on a journey to transform not just our business model, but also transform our culture and the employee experience, so that we can continue to do our best work. Our people managers play a key role in Nielsen’s success, especially with employee retention, engagement and overall satisfaction. Our managers have access to many different training pathways depending on what they need and when—from on-demand People Leader Essentials training pathways in Degreed, to application-based development cohorts like Lead for new people leaders and Boost for experienced people leaders.

How are Nielsen’s responsibility and sustainability practices integrated into Nielsen’s core business strategy? 

Sandra: We are committed to counting everyone in our audience measurement data—across race, ethnicity, gender identities, income and geographies—through our approach of using big data validated by representative panels. These panels help us to identify real audiences and also represent their demographic profile.

And when we have the ability to provide granular audience data, Nielsen can provide advanced audience analytics—well beyond age and gender—to drive insights we share with the media industry through thought leadership like our Diverse Intelligence Series, as well as client-specific insights to help grow their own business.

We can’t do any of this without a commitment to trust, integrity, inclusion and responsibility, from how we handle the data that our panelists trust us with, to how we deliver the data more efficiently and sustainably.

Nicolina: Driving an inclusive culture for and with our people is a critical part of our business strategy. I’m very proud that two professional development programs, the Diverse Leadership Network and GROW, have expanded beyond the United States to include applicants from around the world. The work of our Business Resource Groups and diverse thought leaders connecting with their communities is also very special. Educating all Nielsen people while sharing Nielsen’s insights to amplify underrepresented groups within media and marketing—only Nielsen can do that.

Read the report to learn more about Nielsen’s progress on its 2024 ESG goals.