Nielsen-Goes Live!

This should be interesting.


Agencies and Networks Ponder Nielsen Ad Ratings

By LOUISE STORY
Published: June 1, 2007
THE NIELSEN COMPANY, long the arbiter of television viewership, released standardized ratings of commercials yesterday, giving advertisers more information about how often viewers stay tuned during commercial breaks.
The ratings will trickle into computer systems at television networks and advertising agencies today while ad executives are negotiating billions of dollars of television sales for next year, and it is unclear how the new ratings will affect those deals. The commercial viewership data is not new — Nielsen has included it in one of its main data systems since the end of January — but now the data will be released every week in a standard, easy-to-read format.
“This is going to give everyone the ability, all parties involved, to start speaking the same language,” said Sam Armando, senior vice president and video research director at Starcom USA, an agency in the Publicis Groupe that purchases ads.
Consumer brand companies have traditionally decided how much to pay for television time based on Nielsen’s estimates of how many people watch certain programs. But as more people watch programs on digital video recorders through TiVo and other services, advertisers have become concerned that people might be zipping past their messages. The new ratings estimate the number of people, on average, watching ads over the course of a program.
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Advertisers have been most concerned about whether people who own DVRs watch their ads, because those viewers can fast-forward through ads with the click of a remote.
But to the relief of networks, Nielsen data has shown that on average, people with DVRs still see about two-thirds of ads in their television viewing. That’s because about half of television viewing in households with DVRs is played back after the original broadcast of the program, and about 40 percent of the commercials in that time-shifted viewing are not fast-forwarded.
“The notion a year ago was that any commercial that was viewed on a time-shifted DVR had no value,” said Alan Wurtzel, president for research at NBC Universal. “All of that was wrong.”
Yesterday, Nielsen released similar data about viewing patterns. The data was based on viewership from the first week of May and showed that most DVR playback takes place within a day of the program’s broadcast. Broadcast television programs tend to be played back through DVRs more frequently than cable programs, and news and sports events are most often watched live.
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In DVR households, viewers of broadcast television programs like “The Office” on NBC and “The Family Guy” on Fox are most likely to watch commercials. Thus, television networks with lots of time-delayed viewing on DVRs stand to gain the most from commercial ratings, if they can keep their fans from fast-forwarding through ads.