The Art (And Science) Of Measurement with Extreme Reach’s Sherman Li

We focus a lot at TVREV on what happens when an ad appears on a screen. But XR (Extreme Reach) occupies a unique position in the ad ecosystem: For many advertisers, they’re there from pre-production all the way through delivery, providing payroll services and asset management. 

This holistic view gives Sherman Li, SVP of Strategic Alliances at XR (Extreme Reach), a different perspective on the industry. “Measurement is more art than science,” he says. Li sat down with Alan Wolk about how XR is integrating with Nielsen One measurement and how to close the loop.

What’s new?

XR is an international ad operations platform. We work with the largest brands in the world to pay the cast and crew. From there, we have an asset management platform where all advertising is stored, and then we deliver it to any destination: linear television, connected television, digital, out-of-home, radio… We’re the central hub for delivering advertising.

We are not a measurement provider. We recently announced digital integration with Nielsen one, so you can actually get measurement from the source.

What problem does the Nielsen deal solve for your customers?

Extreme Reach can help you understand how you deliver the ad—it doesn't necessarily let you know exactly how effective it is. Having a measurement provider like in Nielsen gives you that visibility by appending all Nielsen’s data sets, what audiences are seeing. 

We help tag every ad going out digitally, and Nielsen can provide measurement. We've also been working with Amazon ads, and recently announced that we have integrated with Amazon ads in order to deliver your ads efficiently to their DSP.

Where do you think your market is going?

We've been talking in this industry for a long time about closed loop attribution. We're getting closer. What is going to be changing the future is AI. 

There's a lot of movement right now about setting up MCP servers and activating agentic AI for advertising. We’ll be there to enable that for our customers as that evolves, and hopefully we can achieve that understanding of where ads are being delivered, how effective they are, and really get to that closed loop attribution that this industry has been talking about for a long time.