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A provision that would have taxed advertising, explicitly including ad measurement and effectiveness research, was stripped out of the Governor’s big tax bill, Nebraska L.B. 1.

Following the failures of earlier bills in the Nebraska legislature with the same provisions (L.B. 388 and L.B. 1354), the provisions were again included an omnibus tax bill, this time considered during a special session in Nebraska this summer, at the behest of the governor.

L.B. 1 was eventually pared down to a minor series of tax changes and the ad tax was removed.

The Insights Association, the leading nonprofit trade association for the insights industry, opposed this legislation in concert with a larger coalition of groups.

The 7.5 percent tax on revenue from an "advertising service" would have included "the monitoring and evaluation of website traffic for purposes of determining the effectiveness of an advertising campaign."

Howard Fienberg, Senior VP for the Insights Association, commended Cornhusker state lawmakers for doing the right thing.

“This tax would have increased the costs of advertising measurement and research in Nebraska and discourage informed decision-making. The fallout from the tax would have hit not just larger market research and analytics firms measuring audiences, but also on the audience measurement work conducted by smaller firms for large advertising companies, and on big advertising companies’ insights departments. The Nebraska measurement tax would have needlessly flushed away resources and driven up costs for businesses and consumers. The insights industry hopes that Nebraska policymakers will turn their attention to more fulsome approaches to raising revenue for the state government.”