TV Industry Frets As Nielsen to Unveil Ad Ratings

By Mark Shannon O'Neill / R.O.I. Media Solutions

Same numbers: commercial minutes off +/- 10%.  Radio crows while TV "frets."

NOTE:  Radio needs to take control of this message.

Fascinating!  The Television industry is "fretting."  The WSJ is suggesting that when the new commercial ratings are released that it "might be a good day to out of the office."  Seems that the Nielsen data that is about to be unveiled suggests that ad ratings are showing a "noticeable decline, perhaps as much as 5% to 10%."  From today's Wall Street Journal:

For many television executives, particularly at cable channels that carry a lot of commercials, Nov. 18 might be a good day to be out of the office.

That is the day Nielsen Media Research is scheduled to release, for the first time, formal ratings for commercial breaks.

Nielsen Ads for A2/M2...

Nielsen is running ads in various online newsletters about their new Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement.  The banner ad looks like this...

Which opens a page that looks like this...

The links in that site include much of the information that was included in the PPMNews note entitled Nielsen Enters the Discussion.

Clear Channel Seen As Adopting PPM

JIM BOYLE, A VETERAN RADIO analyst with CL King, speculated Friday that a recent collaboration between a Clear Channel-owned property and Arbitron, which used the Portable People Meter (PPM), foreshadows the adoption of PPM measurement by Clear Channel sometime in the fourth quarter. If he's right, Boyle sees the end of a long, sometimes acrimonious dispute over the next generation of radio metrics.

Pointing to the close cooperation and scale of investment for the study by Arbitron and Media Monitors, a research company owned by Clear Channel, Boyle wrote: "We find it a potential positive for PPM that a CCU-owned company cooperated with ARB to put out a major radio study that greatly relied on PPM data."  [ MORE ]

Nielsen Adds Verizon as Mobile Entertainment Sales Data Provider

Nielsen Mobile and Verizon Wireless have announced that Verizon Wireless will provide weekly ring tones, Ringback Tones, and full-length over-the-air music download sales data for Nielsen Mobile's comprehensive point of sales tracking services. Individual customer information will not be shared with Nielsen Mobile.

Nielsen Mobile compiles data from wireless carriers, aggregators and other mobile entertainment retailers. Inaugurated in January of 2005, Nielsen Mobile is one of the latest additions to Nielsen Entertainment's portfolio of existing businesses dedicated to providing information and analysis tools and marketing solutions to the global entertainment industry.  [ From Computing News ]

Early Nielsen Commercial Data Will Be Labeled Experimental

Nielsen Media Research will label the first batch of average commercial minute ratings it releases as experimental, according to executives who attended a meeting Thursday morning to discuss Nielsen's plan among ad buyers and network executives.

Cable network executives hope the label will discourage ad buyers from using the data as a currency for buying ads until several bugs Nielsen's data-generation method are worked out.

Nielsen executives attended the meeting. A spokesman for the ratings service said he didn't think anything was agreed to at the meeting. "There was not a consensus," he said.  [MORE at TVWeek.com ]

Arbitron/ Coleman Commercial Tune-out Study

Radio Holds More Than 92% of Its Lead-In Audience During the Average Commercial Break

New Study from Arbitron, Media Monitors and Coleman Dispels Industry Perception That Listeners Tune Away from Commercials in Large Numbers

Radio ratings data from Arbitron's Portable People Meter and commercial occurrence data from Media Monitors indicate that the lowest rated minute during an average commercial break is 92 percent of the size of the audience before the spots began, according to a new study by Arbitron, Inc. (NYSE: ARB), Media Monitors and Coleman.

What Happens When the Spots Come On: The Impact of Commercials on the Radio Audience is the first in a series of studies on the radio audience behavior during commercials using the power of passive electronic measurement, both for audiences and for commercial occurrences.

The study dispels the mistaken belief among advertisers, agencies and radio executives that radio loses a considerable portion of its audience during commercial breaks.

Full Press Release at Arbitron.com

Download the Study at Arbitron.com

This Study and Other PPM Info at ColemanInsights.com

Cell phones as media...

...  cell phones as media measurement devices.

There is an article in this morning's eMarketer Newsletter that outlines the projected growth in mobile advertising revenue.  The teaser line for reading the article is "No ads on your mobile phone lately? Don't worry, they're on their way.  Full Article"

The article is built around this chart:

On September 7th, AdAge carried an article under the headlines "Clear Channel Streaming Radio to Cellphones.  Next Step in Making Radio Available Anytime, Anywhere."  (PPMNews noted the headline with some humor when it appeared.)

Don't headlines like these take the "gizmo" discussion in a whole new direction?  What

Nielsen Enters the Discussion

By Mark Shannon O'Neill / R.O.I. Media Solutions

It appears that Nielsen Media Research is now under consideration by the Clear Channel initiated "RFP" committee that is reviewing companies that have technologies that could passively measure radio listening.  While Arbitron appears to be the closest to actually being able to deliver an accredited "currency" version of their Personal People Meter, one would have to consider a Nielsen proposal as credible.

Nielsen has been working on an initiative that they call Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement (A2/M2).  The focus (and the language) of their website is obviously directed towards Television measurement, but as lines between traditional Television, online media and portable media begin to blur, it becomes clear that Nielsen would have the technology and the infrastructure to measure radio as well. 

The term "radio" is not used on the site nor in the documents describing A2/M2, but if this system

Arbitron Field Tests a Portable People Meter That Tracks Unencoded Radio Stations

Arbitron successfully downloads audio matching software into seperate 50-person test panel;  Demonstrates ability to create "dual-function" PPMs using current hardware

NEW YORK; September 11, 2006 – Arbitron Inc. (NYSE: ARB) announced today that it is field testing the addition of an audio matching capability to the Portable People Meter (PPM^SM) electronic ratings system which would allow the PPM to track audiences to radio stations that choose not to encode their signals.

The dual-function meter is capable of identifying a radio station using two methods of detection using existing Portable People Meter hardware.

First, a dual-function PPM can detect inaudible codes in the audio of stations that are equipped with the Arbitron PPM encoder. In addition, a dual-function PPM can also collect audio signatures for any radio station, which are later matched to signatures collected by an in-market monitoring system.

Arbitron’s current test is designed to calibrate radio listening estimates produced by audio matching to the estimates produced by the PPM encoding system for the same set of stations.  [ Full Press Release at Arbitron.com ]

MediaWeek: Nielsen Mulls Radio Measurement; In Talks With CC

From MediaWeek:

Nielsen’s potential entry into radio could pose additional problems for Arbitron beyond challenging the radio ratings’ company’s core business. The two companies are currently partnering in Project Apollo, a national marketing service that combines Arbitron’s PPM with ACNielsen’s consumer scanner panels to provide advertisers with multimedia and product purchase data from a common sample of consumers. Project Apollo has six major advertisers participating in the pilot service.  [ MORE ]