Insight Into Nielsen

Many thanks to Rich at Copywrite Ink for his insight into Nielsen ratings.



"It’s not a great year to be Nielsen. Every time the company attempts to move forward with Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement — A2/M2 — someone is ready to stop them: clients, competition, consumers.

For Project Apollo, a three-year joint project with Arbitron to monitor buying and radio-television habits of 5,000 households, it was clients. They did not want to pay for the results. Consumers weren’t thrilled with the number of tasks they were asked to perform either. It’s not as cool to be a Nielsen family anymore.

Diane Mermigas, editor-at-large at MediaPost, recently called Nielsen the “about as inane an advertising value as can ever be justified” in her article about other initiatives to find effective measures. She’s not alone.

The differences between Nielsen ratings and other measures continue to grow, more and more shows are seeing 20 percent to 25 percent ratings gains when DVR viewing is calculated and some other are shows doubling their viewership online. It’s easier to get the numbers from TiVo or local cable companies that can count everyone.

Anyone who has a show facing cancellation (most recently, the show Moonlight) is continuing to send Nielsen a message — Nielsen might be confident in the rating system, but they are not. It’s a mounting public relations problem that Nielsen has yet to successfully address. For many consumers, Nielsen’s truncated research, not actual viewers, is the only reason their show was cancelled."

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."