p2pnet - rss feed: Dark clouds loom for Nielsen
p2pnet.net News Feature:- There is a bit of a black cloud gathering over Nielsen Media, the unofficial
monopoly of US TV ratings, over its decision to go ahead using
Local People Meters, automated tracking tools to follow US
viewing habits.
An anti ‘people meter’ group has sprung up these last few weeks calling itself the ‘Don’t count us out Coalition,’ which makes the point that Nielsen’s old methods of counting up who watches what programs, simply don’t tally with what the new People Meters are saying.
The new LPMs take their information from devices like remote controls that are used to manually click on who is present in a household when a particular program is on. The Coalition says that Nielsen has never made any effort to test the accuracy of Local People Meters in an ethnically diverse, racially mixed, urban market such as New York.
The group therefore claims that certain ethnic groups are not being sufficiently heard, and therefore TV programming is likely to be canned which they love, despite huge viewing support. This is turn disadvantages members of those communities that make programs, or who have chosen to air programs for minorities.
The Coalition cites what it describes as a long term under reporting of African Americans and Latinos, and says that despite Nielsen counting TV audiences since the 1950s, it only began including Spanish speakers in 1992.
The only ways in which the new system can under report is either by failing to key all the viewers in a room or by not putting the LPMs into enough homes to represent the growing minority communities. However the Coalition shows figures that it says come from Nielsen itself that shows that it underreported in a Boston trial of LPMs by as much as 46% in certain racial groups, effectively halving audiences sizes, leading to spiralling ad revenues for the programs they were watching.
There is a darker and more worrying series of thoughts behind the distrust that is being fanned over Nielsen’s services that dates back to late last year.
Nielsen’s TV ratings lost 10% of the 18 to 34 year old male TV viewing audience in a single quarter, and every TV company has wanted the figures to be wrong. So much so that there have been murmurings and calls for investigations into just how come a non-US company (Nielsen is currently owned by Dutch conglomerate VNU) can have achieved a monopoly in a US space, and yet its methods are not open to scrutiny.
There is an underlying, and for the most part unspoken, concern that Nielsen can publish just what the hell it likes and all of the TV community has no option but to go along with it, canning series and cutting ad rates for shows that they thought would take off, but which by the evidence of Nielsen, just haven’t worked out.
Call to ban LPMs until they can address ’shortcomings’
The need for instant gratification among the US TV advertiser is so powerful that $500 million worth of new series TV productions were killed off after launches in the last Fall season. The TV Production houses are becoming resistant to funding such huge launches, with the likelihood that both national broadcast and local TV and cable channel TV is likely to offer more and more impoverished content.
All the current ‘Don’t count us out Coalition’ is asking for is that Nielsen does not implement Local People Meters (LPMs) in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago until it has address the shortcomings of the services. The Media Rating Council recently carried out an audit which demonstrated the differences between results from LPMs and old paper diary based methods that Nielsen used to use.
In its mind it just assumes that the LPMs are not working properly and that they can be fixed and forced to come up with the old results that diary used to create.
But what if it’s the other way around? What if the LPMs are right, but they are right for the very first time and that previous attempts to measure viewing preferences either failed due to the imperfect recall of the interviewees or due to some process imperfection?
Prior methods are based on recruited households, 1,000s of them, remembering to place viewing preferences in a diary for later recall and throwing switches on static, in home people meters.
No one in US TV wants to think about that because it would mean that the entire edifice upon which US TV funding was based, will have been proven to be suspect.
It could lead to the collapse of advertising right across TV and potentially to the collapse of Nielsen with a resulting leaderless industry.
What it the LPMs are right for the very first time?
If it turned out to be the case that the LPMs are a much closer guideline to what people are watching than previous methods, then perversely why would anyone trust them, from a company that had delivered an imperfect system for so long? If Nielsen is forced to open up the LPM data to a permanent audit, then why not go a step further and offer it to competing services?
We might have repercussions of the potential size of Enron and Worldcom if that were the case, with Nielsen placed in the invidious position of Andersen and wiped out in the process. In effect Nielsen is the audit for US TV, if it turns out that it can’t be trusted, then the outcome will indeed be just like Andersen.
So despite the fact that the Tribune Media group, Univision, Fox and CBS have all come out in support of a delay by Nielsen, the ratings company had seemed determined to go ahead right up until last week.
Last Wednesday it issued its own counter accusation saying that the LPMs have been proven to be more accurate than any measurement process that has gone before, that it’s trials have fully represented people of all races, and that delaying its roll out only benefits certain corporate interests.
A call for the hand behind the movement to be revealed Nielsens says that what has been said by ads run by the coalition is a deliberate distortion of the facts, which it re-iterates as LPMs being accurate, that it has met with everyone that matters and demonstrated that it works just as well for African Americans and Latinos and that it does a better job of measuring than older, paper diaries and that the LPMs cannot prejudice against any viewer group.
But Nielsen has gone further, pointing out that advertising run by the Coalition has also been condemned by the Media Rating Council (MRC) and asks the Coalition ‘to explain where its extraordinary resources’ are coming from. It is urging the MRC to take appropriate action.
The barbed comments are aimed directly at News Corp which is thought to be behind the funding of the anti-LPM advertising. News Corp has committed to launch a Spanish speaking TV channel, which, if the LPMs are believed, may attract significantly lower advertising as a result. There are $100s millions at stake but the MRC has the power to fine or expel News Corp if it takes issue with how it has behaved.
But the criticism has also affected Nielsen which has effectively caved in. It is aware that its credibility is hanging by a thread, so has decided to offer its clients both Local People Meter and Set Meter/ Diary data for the next three months. Previously Nielsen said it would ignore the objections of the MRC.
The underlying problem is clear. Games play, high speed internet use, DVD players and DVRs are all affecting the ability of advertisers to reach US eyeballs in the conventional way, but the companies that make a living out of this, up to and including Nielsen, and down to every last TV station, simply do not want to accept the inevitable.
Each of them will push their own version of any particular story in the hope of keeping a digital revolution at bay. In the end that cannot happen and advertisers will be seduced by other routes to market that are more effective. Faultline has seen this in the rise in online advertising, and in product placement in the gaming industry.
This type of spat just draws attention to the issue and means that more big brand companies will be starting to experiment with alternative routes to market for their brand. The next step is for the Coalition to take legal action against Nielsen and for Nielsen to return fire as this disintegrates into a public airing of dirty laundry.
The TV markets will not collapse overnight, but the seeds are constantly being sown for alternative brand development and TV advertising WILL be overhauled by other types of brand creation exercises. The result will be a total reshaping of our TV markets over the next 5 to 15 years and this row will only accelerate that.
Peter White - Faultline, UK
June 8th, 2004 at 2:18 am
ive worked in broadcasting for over 10 years . this system is generally accepted as pure fantasy by insiders. no progress has ever been made to date to correct this system. if proven to be less than accurate, it would cause huge problems for advertising sales. clients could then sue people they have advertised with to recoup moneys that were charged based on one companies whim. (and it is veiwed that way. one company. no oversight. broadcasters get no choice. if they did we would have done away with neilson long ago.) if you dont play the game, you cant sell advertising to anyone because there is NO OTHER accepted way in the industry to determine veiwership. neilson go away.
June 8th, 2004 at 9:01 pm
Despite the equivocation in this article, it is 100% verified that Rupert Murdoch and his henchman are completely behind this supposed “grassroots” effort against Nielsen. They are upset because when the real numbers come out and their horrible television shows receive their true ratings, they stand to lose millions in advertising revenue. Well, that’s not Nielsen’s fault, who has no stake whatsoever in whether a show’s ratings are high, medium, or low. Perhaps Murdoch’s people need to figure out how to put out quality shows as opposed to hijacking the ratings system for their own self-serving purposes.