NEW YORK — The Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) is recommending the choice of either “Households” or “Persons 2+” as new co-standards for video audience guarantees.
The recommended move “to a choice of the widest and most comparable audience bases for video ad campaign audience guarantees — particularly for entertainment content — evolves the legacy buy/sell practice of guarantees on narrower, linear-TV-centric standards such as Adults 25-54,” says the VAB.
The announcement from the group, which is challenging Nielsen for what it calls its Big Data + Panel currency shortcomings, came as CES 2026 opens in Las Vegas with VAB CEO Sean Cunningham in attendance,
As the VAB sees it, marketers that adopt these new standards will achieve the highest stability and gain the most comparable audience measures across all content, “but particularly so for entertainment.”
There’s also advanced targeting acceleration, as the VAB says the widespread use of first party data-fueled targeting tools by both the buy and sell sides reveals a much less critical role for age/sex partial audience definitions as being any marketer’s true target.
Furthermore, the VAB says transacting on wider standards allows for maximum flexibility in fitting inventory to precise and customized target definitions.
And, adopting the new standards can bring cross-platform comparability. “[W]hile levels of specialized audience precision and custom means of activation will always productively exist in different forms ‘below the hood’ of each major ad platform, count comparability on common standards is high on the marketer’s ‘must’ list.”
Intended for immediate injection into buyer/seller dialogues, the recommendation of Households or P2+ for audience guarantees is seen as a thoroughly modern “win-win” by Cunningham. “With 2026 buyers and sellers having such precision targeting insights refined so deeply on behaviors and identity that so surpass partial age/sex groupings, those aggregations seem outmoded and artificial,” he says. “Transacting across wider canvasses, guaranteeing across a choice of wider audiences with maximum stability, and then letting the precision optimization tools do their magic aligns with how video media is activated by marketers today.”
