Antiquated Nielsen

"Of course, earlier I touched on the dangers that television programs face in the relevance of the soon to be antiquated Nielsen system as more and more shows are DVR’d and downloaded from iTunes, as Jericho showed. After Jericho got trashed in the ratings for it’s beleaguered 2nd season, it was the most downloaded show on iTunes. The math (logic) just doesn’t add up, but the advertising dollars do, as far as network execs are concerned, and their fat paychecks are dependent on!

Despite the disparities that we, the viewers are suffering when quality content gets dumped, they say that studios are trying to get ahead of this technological deficit. (Great, then bring back Jericho and Journeyman!)

Despite putting shows online with limited advertising, the revenue from those efforts is only a small fraction of what they make. They say it’s due to the smaller internet audience, and that might be true."

Online: Network Ad Rates

"Networks now charge more per thousand viewers online than they do over the airwaves, where the average for a primetime show is about $25. Analysts put the online rate anywhere from $35 to $50 per thousand, though there are millions more potential traditional TV viewers.

Advertisers pay more online because there is a better accounting of how many viewers see the ads and an extra benefit that an impulse to purchase can be acted on with the click of a mouse."
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"In my opinion we should drop the currency debate. The currency is the almighty US dollar, not Nielsen's panel-based ratings. We should embrace new metrics that shed light on some of the more pressing issues in advertising. Imagine being able to compare which news networks have the most loyal viewers as ranked by appointment viewing. Would anyone be interested in knowing what the audience turnover for a typical weeknight is on MTV and how it might compare to Comedy Central or G4? Is one network a reach vehicle and another better suited for building brand awareness? With new metrics, all these insights are possible."

Have It Your Way

"The digital out-of-home marketplace has seen rapid growth this year, from the formation of the Out-Of-Home Video Advertising Bureau in January to key players tripling their spending in a span of months. Double-digit growth means it's time for organized metrics -- no easy feat for a market that includes everything from elevators to urinals.

PQ Media expects out-of-home-video spending to increase to $1.28 billion by the end of 2007 (up from $1.1 billion in 2006), with an additional $365 million for digital billboards and displays."



"Part of the reason for the increased proliferation of advertising is part Internet (with Facebook leading the charge) and part consumer behavior toward network television. The American Advertising Federation is currently running a smart poll that asks its readers if they use their DVRs to fast-forward commercials. So far, more than 85 percent say they do (and AAF SmartBrief readers are predominantly advertising people)."



"The writers strike has media buyers growing cautious about the efficacy of TV advertising in the weeks ahead and in the first quarter of 2008 -- and mulling strategies for possible reallocation of marketers' ad spending. The fourth quarter is an especially fraught time for marketers to not be able to count on TV as a reach vehicle, as many are pushing products for the holidays."



"United Hollywood, one of the best sites for strike coverage, has taken a page out of the
"Jericho" fans playbook (remember when they sent truckloads of nuts to CBS to protest the show's cancellation and it worked?) and decided to become creative in sending a message to the studios. With the Pencils2MediaMoguls campaign, for only one dollar you can send a box of pencils to a mogul as part of a petition to demand that the media moguls bargain in good faith and create a fair deal with the Writers Guild of America. You can even send the pencils in honor of your favorite TV show. ( I sent several boxes in honor of "House.")."

CBS and Teletrax

"Teletrax today announced that CBS Television Distribution (CTD) will electronically monitor and evaluate usage of its broadcast marketing and promotional content on television stations nationwide using the digital watermarking and broadcast tracking service. Teletrax is a subsidiary of Medialink Worldwide Incorporated .

CTD, a unit of CBS Corp. , a leader in worldwide television syndication, will utilize the Teletrax(TM) comprehensive suite of broadcast intelligence services to electronically monitor and analyze affiliate stations' usage of its on-air television show promotions across all 210 major cities, or DMAs, in the United States. Teletrax will provide CTD with reports detailing how its video content is used and aired by affiliate stations, so it can evaluate marketing campaign performance and more precisely measure return-on-investment and maximize overall profits."



"We've all read stories heralding the death of advertising as we know it. But have consumers really abandoned advertising?

The answer, it seems, rests on the shoulders of the people who buy our brands and recommend them to others -- not with advertisers, marketers or consultants. That's why we went straight to the source by visiting people's homes in Columbus, Ohio (a test-marketing Mecca) to do the unthinkable: mess with their media. We deprived them of their TiVos, their laptops and their cellphones. We added ourselves to their e-mail lists. We asked them to journal their feelings and attitudes. We discovered that consumers don't do what they say, and that they've become experts in ignoring and rejecting messages. They can instantly recognize messages that are irrelevant or ill-timed."

Jericho, Nielsen, and You- Part III

Nielsen collects viewing information for national and local programs — not only what's being viewed but also the composition of the audience (demographic data).

Daily household minute-by-minute viewing and tuning data, from both the national and local metered samples, is stored in the in-home metering system until it is automatically retrieved by Nielsen computers each night. Once the data is relayed via phone lines to the operations center in Florida it is processed that same night for release to the television industry the next day.

Nielsen collects information from approximately 25,000 metered households starting about 3 a.m. each day, process about 10 million viewing minutes a day, and makes over 4,000 gigabytes of data available for customer access the next day. They collect and process data from 1.6 million handwritten paper diaries from households across the country during sweep periods.

When the meter data is transmitted from the home to Nielsen, it is in raw code form. Nielsen then runs a series of tests to ensure the integrity of this data.

If a problem is discovered, the system will flag the data from that household, analyze the problem, and determine the best course of action for correcting it. The solution may be as simple as calling the household to gather some information. In other cases they may schedule a Nielsen representative to visit the household and repair or replace metering equipment, or re-coach the family members on usage of our equipment.

Once the data has been validated, Nielsen's systems combine the transmitted and internal reference data to convert it to ratings information.

Sometimes advertisers want information such as are children watching cartoons with their parents or which zip codes are tuning into the football game? Answers to these and other questions help clients place advertising effectively, determine if a program is working well on a particular day, or decide if pairing it with another program would yield better results.

Stay tuned. More tomorrow in Part IV.