The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement released a report on July 15, 2026 finding that data on which households contain children is accurate only 42% of the time, a shortfall that turns a $1 million advertising campaign into $590,000 of wasted spend, and launched a cross-industry taskforce to close the gap.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, known as CIMM, published When Metrics Fall Short: The Case for Children's Media Measurement on July 15, 2026, and simultaneously convened a Kids & Family Media Measurement Taskforce with ten founding members. The report argues that children's viewing has migrated decisively into fragmented digital environments while the systems built to measure audiences have stayed rooted in the broadcast era. According to CIMM, that mismatch is no longer an abstract technical complaint. It carries what the coalition describes as material economic consequences for advertisers, publishers, and the studios that fund children's programming.

The report was authored by Emily Horgan, an independent media consultant and former Disney executive, and developed from interviews with more than 30 industry stakeholders alongside a CIMM executive roundtable held in April 2025. It runs to 47 pages and closes with six stakeholder case studies contributed by Cricket Media, Moonbug Entertainment, Nielsen, Paramount, Precisify, Truthset, and Tubular Labs.

A 42% accuracy problem with a dollar figure attached

The starkest finding concerns the reliability of the data advertisers already buy. Independent data science firm Truthset analyzed more than 4 billion U.S. consumer records from the fourth quarter of 2024 and found that identifying whether a household contains children succeeds only 42% of the time. The picture worsens when broken down by gender of the adult record. Accuracy for identifying whether a woman has children present in the home sits at 36.5%, and for men it falls to 28.7%. By contrast, the same providers correctly classify gender itself 83.9% of the time for women and 82.2% for men.

Truthset attributes the gap to how the two attributes are generated. Gender can be inferred with reasonable confidence from first names, survey responses, and consumer registrations. Parental status is rarely declared in commercial datasets, so providers fall back on proxies such as toy purchases, diaper buys, or magazine subscriptions. Those signals lapse as children age, they can reflect gifts for nieces, nephews, or grandchildren rather than children in the home, and a single diaper purchase logged against a male record can produce a false parent signal that never gets corrected. The firm also found that accuracy degrades by up to 50% with each additional data match as records move through onboarding, device graphs, and demand-side platforms.

The financial translation is explicit in the report. At 41% accuracy, a $1 million campaign targeting households with children at a $10 CPM effectively wastes $590,000, producing an on-target CPM of $24.39. Filtering out the least accurate records and working with higher-accuracy data at an average 58% score cuts the effective CPM to $16 and reduces waste to $210,000. Running the same budget against the least accurate records, averaging 21% accuracy, pushes the effective CPM to $48 and burns $790,000 of the $1 million. Truthset's own measurement of roughly 1 billion hashed email addresses in the first quarter of 2025 put the average accuracy score for presence of children at 41%, with individual providers ranging from a low of 33% to a high of 67%, and no consistent advantage for larger data vendors.

Where children's attention actually went

The report grounds its argument in a decade of viewing redistribution. Drawing on Nielsen and Common Sense Media data, it states that linear television, which accounted for roughly 80 to 90% of young children's video time in 2005, represented only around 6% by 2025. Premium streaming and YouTube together now capture 67% of children's video consumption, split as 35% for streaming services and 32% for YouTube, while short-form content on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts adds a further 16%.

Overall screen time has grown more modestly than the platform shift suggests. Daily screen time for children aged 0 to 8 rose from about 1 hour 44 minutes in 2005 to 2 hours 27 minutes by 2025, with mobile devices moving from roughly 5 minutes a day to the dominant platform. For teenagers, entertainment screen time increased from around 6.5 hours to more than 7.5 hours across the same window. The point the report presses is that consumption expanded while standardized cross-platform visibility deteriorated.

There are approximately 73 million children in the United States, just over one-fifth of the population, and the report segments them into five developmental cohorts: babies aged 0 to 3, preschoolers aged 2 to 5, kids aged 6 to 11, tweens aged 9 to 12, and teens aged 13 to 17. Each behaves differently. Co-viewing dominates early childhood, gaming and short-form video define the tween and teen years, and content interests fragment so sharply once children control their own viewing that, in the words of one children's media specialist quoted in the report, preschool viewing clusters around 10 to 15 major franchises before splintering into thousands of niche properties.

Gaming and YouTube: the measurement blind spots

Two environments account for large shares of children's time yet remain largely invisible to standard measurement. Gaming platforms such as Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are interactive, session-based, and user-generated, with no standardized program units that panel-style logging can capture. The report states that no standardized program equivalence exists in the gaming market, leaving publishers without a joined-up view of consumption.

The commercial stakes there are visible in Roblox coverage over the past year. Roblox positioned its advertising platform for expansion after mandatory age verification revealed that 27% of verified users are adults, with rewarded video formats achieving completion rates above 90% across more than 1,000 brands. Magnite secured programmatic video access to the platform's 151 million daily users, and SuperAwesome became the platform's exclusive under-13 advertising partner using contextual rather than behavioral targeting. That contextual approach exists precisely because behavioral measurement of under-13 users is off the table.

YouTube presents a different limitation. Its first-party analytics supply views, watch time, and retention at the channel level, but demographic data is available only for users aged 13 and older because of COPPA restrictions, leaving the platform's substantial under-13 audience without audience context. Nielsen data cited in the report shows children hold a 23.9% share of viewing to YouTube Main, indexing above their share of the overall population, and that kids spend more than two hours a day on TikTok. The report notes that YouTube's 30-second threshold for counting a view further complicates comparison with other platforms.

The COPPA question the report wants reopened

Much of the measurement shortfall is routinely blamed on the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, but the report advances a narrower reading. COPPA, enacted in 1998 and substantially updated in 2013, restricts the tracking and behavioral profiling of children under 13 and carries penalties of up to $43,280 per violation. It does not, the report argues, prohibit household-level measurement or the identification of adult co-viewers. The 2019 FTC settlement with YouTube, which led the platform to deactivate Made for Kids personalization globally on January 1, 2020, targeted behavioral advertising aimed at children rather than the measurement of parents watching alongside them.

The distinction matters commercially because parents are the economic buyers for young children's content. According to the report, some stakeholders contend that certain platform policy implementations are more restrictive than the statute strictly requires, and the industry's stated aim is clarity on privacy-compliant household and co-viewing measurement rather than any expansion of behavioral tracking of children.

This positioning arrives against a backdrop of intensifying enforcement and rulemaking that PPC Land has tracked closely. The FTC published comprehensive COPPA amendments that took effect June 23, 2025, introducing separate consent requirements for third-party data sharing and an expanded definition of child-directed services, with a compliance deadline of April 22, 2026. In February 2026, the agency issued a policy statement that gave age-verification technology a conditional enforcement shield. Its 2026 to 2030 strategic plan placed children's data among its front-line priorities. Enforcement has not been theoretical: Disney agreed to pay $10 million in September 2025 after the FTC found it had systematically failed to designate child-directed videos as Made for Kids, a case that turned on channel-level classification masking individual videos aimed at children.

Why panels and big data each fall short

The report frames current measurement as a patchwork in which no single provider offers comprehensive cross-platform visibility. Panels run by Nielsen and Comscore secure explicit parental consent and produce verifiable, privacy-compliant data, but they were built for a world of a few high-reach channels. In a panel of 50,000 households, perhaps 5,000 contain children under 12. Divide that across age cohorts and then across platforms, and sample cells shrink to single digits, too small for content-level or advertiser-level reporting. A single household's behavior can then swing reported ratings, introducing volatility that erodes advertiser trust. Panels also underestimate co-viewing, a particular problem for young audiences who frequently watch with a parent.

Big data sets such as Smart TV automatic content recognition, set-top box logs, and server data offer scale but rarely identify child viewers. Children under 12 generally lack phones, email addresses, or accounts in their own names, so they are largely absent from the identity graphs that link panel findings to population-level models. Such data may confirm that a children's program played on a given television without revealing who was in the room. The Nielsen contribution to the report notes that kids audiences, which it defines as persons 2 to 18, represented 18.3% of the total universe estimate as of April 2025, holding a 3.4% share of linear viewing but a far larger 17.1% share of streaming.

The reliability question is not confined to children's data. Broader CIMM research has repeatedly documented accuracy problems across the identity layer. A CIMM and Go Addressable study reported by PPC Land in late 2025 found that IP-based household targeting can miss 87% of households, and Truthset analysis in that work put postal accuracy at 13% and email accuracy at 16% across nearly a billion IP records.

The vendor case studies, and their commercial framing

Six companies supplied case studies, and the report is transparent that several are interested parties selling measurement or targeting solutions. Precisify, formerly Precise TV, described its PACE product, built on proprietary panels of parents and children in the 2 to 12 and 13 to 17 brackets combined with data points across YouTube and more than 300,000 in-app environments. According to Precisify, the tool reduces media wastage by 60% while helping brands reach upwards of 90% of their intended under-17 demographic. Cricket Media reported that its Sensical contextual targeting solution delivered video completion rates of 97% and 98% across two campaigns, with one preschool doll campaign producing 47% ad recall and an 18-point lift in brand affinity. Tubular Labs argued that watch-time and minutes-watched metrics help position kids content creators as media companies with genuine reach.

These figures come from the vendors themselves and describe individual campaigns rather than independently audited market benchmarks, a caveat the report's structure makes visible by presenting them as contributed case studies rather than coalition findings.

The taskforce and what it plans to do

The newly launched Kids & Family Media Measurement Taskforce lists ten founding members: A Parent Media Co., Cricket Media, Moonbug, Paramount, Precisify, Truthset, TVision, Wantent, Warner Bros. Discovery, and WildBrain. Membership is open to the wider industry. According to CIMM, the group will work on integrated frameworks that combine panels, big data, and platform insights, develop metrics reflecting co-viewing and repeat viewing, and explore synthetic datasets and AI-assisted modeling to fill gaps while preserving privacy.

The report sets out three broad recommendations that the taskforce inherits. The first is the taskforce itself, addressing what the report calls the absence of any US trade body dedicated specifically to children's media, with an inaugural meeting planned for the second quarter of 2026. The second is structured engagement with major platforms as systemic partners, covering policy consultation, co-designed COPPA-compliant reporting, and revenue models that reward developmental value over raw watch time. The third is exploration of collaborative measurement initiatives, including a common integrated measurement solution, program-level data sharing from streaming partners, bespoke kids media frameworks, and a synthetic children's population dataset generated from census, survey, and panel inputs.

Jon Watts, Managing Director of CIMM, framed the stakes in the announcement. "The children's media landscape has fundamentally changed over the past decade, but the systems used to measure audiences have not kept pace," he said. He added that without reliable, privacy-compliant measurement, "the industry risks losing visibility into where and how children engage with content across platforms," warning that the gap "can distort advertising strategies, limit innovation, and make it harder to sustain high-quality children's programming."

Founding members echoed the commercial logic. Dan'l Hewitt, Global Head of Brand Partnerships at Moonbug Entertainment, said there is "a clear gap between how families actually consume media and how the industry measures and values that behavior." Christian Dankl, Co-CEO and Co-Founder at Precisify, pointed to "a significant disconnect between how Gen Alpha actually consumes online media and how the industry measures the audience size." Greg Iocco, VP of Audience Measurement at Warner Bros. Discovery, said the company looked to help develop frameworks that "provide strong privacy protections while simultaneously providing a more accurate assessment of media usage within the kids and family audience."

Why this matters for the marketing community

For advertisers and publishers, the report connects a familiar frustration to a hard number. The measurement problem in children's media is not simply that the sector is hard to reach; it is that the data used to reach it can misfire more than half the time, and the cost of that misfire is now quantified at $590,000 per million dollars spent. That reframes children's audience data from a compliance footnote into a budget line.

The launch also lands in the middle of a broader industry reckoning with measurement confidence. In March 2026, CIMM and the 4As released a study of 197 senior marketers finding that advertiser confidence has not kept pace with measurement capability, with 43% citing cross-platform gaps as a major or severe barrier. Parallel work has documented the same fragmentation across connected TV and streaming, where deduplication across walled gardens remains unsolved, and across European cross-media standards. The children's report extends that thesis into the one audience where privacy law and commercial necessity collide most directly, and where the primary buyers, parents, are frequently invisible in the data.

Whether the taskforce moves the industry beyond diagnosis remains open. The report itself concedes that its recommended solutions, from integrated hybrid measurement to synthetic modeling, are interim and imperfect, and that progress depends on cooperation from the platforms that dominate children's viewership. The 42% figure, however, gives the effort something previous appeals for better children's measurement have lacked: a price tag.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), with a report authored by former Disney executive Emily Horgan, and ten founding taskforce members: A Parent Media Co., Cricket Media, Moonbug, Paramount, Precisify, Truthset, TVision, Wantent, Warner Bros. Discovery, and WildBrain.

What: The release of When Metrics Fall Short: The Case for Children's Media Measurement alongside the launch of a Kids & Family Media Measurement Taskforce. The report finds that data on the presence of children in a household is accurate only 42% of the time, translating to $590,000 of waste on a $1 million campaign, and that children's media consumption has fragmented across streaming, YouTube, and gaming faster than measurement systems have adapted.

When: July 15, 2026, drawing on interviews with more than 30 stakeholders and a CIMM executive roundtable held in April 2025.

Where: The United States, where there are approximately 73 million children and where COPPA governs the collection of data from those under 13.

Why: CIMM argues that the mismatch between how children consume media and how the industry measures it constrains investment, distorts advertising strategies, and threatens the sustainability of high-quality children's programming, and that a coordinated, privacy-compliant response is needed to close the gap.