Howard Shimmel On The Frequency Problem Nobody Owns | The ADOTAT Show S10 E2

A connected TV campaign delivered a three reach and a two hundred frequency. Three percent of the target audience saw the ad. They saw it roughly two hundred times. Howard Shimmel, who has spent forty-seven years inside television measurement, delivers the verdict: "Irwin would grade that with a giant F." The Irwin is Erwin Ephron, who died in 2014, and whose name is on the ARF award Shimmel won in 2026. Shimmel is president of Janus Strategy & Insights, head of strategy and a board member at DataFuelX, and the former Chief Research Officer at Turner. In this episode he tells Pesach Lattin that the tools to fix frequency already exist in shipping software, that switching currencies is a dropdown menu rather than an engineering project, and that the real barrier is inertia and a transaction everyone's comp plan is denominated in. We also get into why frequency is a television problem rather than a CTV problem, what he would build if he could design one currency from scratch, why less than ten percent of roughly twenty-five billion dollars in national linear is bought against an actual audience, and why he refuses to pick between Erwin Ephron and Byron Sharp. Plus Comscore's new CEO, Nielsen's jump from 40,000 panel homes to 45 million, Aquila's odds, whether AI is about to eat the last generation of analysts who can spot a wrong number, and a desert island containing two members of the Grateful Dead, Alan Turing, Barack Obama and George Carlin. The companion issue, including the reporting behind why this problem has survived four decades of everyone agreeing it is a problem, runs at adotat.com. The ADOTAT Show is hosted by Pesach Lattin, investigative journalist and publisher at ADOTAT, covering ad tech fraud, programmatic economics and holding company structures. Confidential tips welcome. Subscribe to ADOTAT: adotat.com ADOTAT+ members get the full analysis and the archive.