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Nielsen Struggles To Track Modern Viewing Habits
RobotRunAmok writes "The Nielsen Company has been the principal entity tracking TV shows' popularity, and, by extension, their potential profitability. But as our media consumption practices change, some believe that Nielsen's methods have not kept pace. A new consortium including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery, and Walt Disney — along with major advertisers — is calling for the creation of a new audience measurement service, and planning to solicit bids from outside firms by the fourth quarter of this year. Nielsen says they're not worried about so many of their customers ganging up on them, having just invested more than a billion dollars in research to stay modern. Except that today Nielsen announced they would pointedly not be adding weights to DVR households, and that adding weights for the presence of a personal computer or Internet access in under-represented households would provide 'no significant change or enhancement' to its national TV ratings sample. The pundits deride Nielsen's 'archaic' methodology and 'disco-era tactics,' but others scoff that such a consortium will only 'put the foxes in charge of the henhouse.' Stay tuned..."
If your viewing habits include skipping all (or timeshifting beyond a couple days) the commercials that pay for the show I don't see why they should give DVR viewers much weight.
It's the eyeballs on commercials that count, not how many people like the show (but not enough to watch it realtime or to watch the commercials). If you like the show but don't want to watch it when it is broadcast watch it off the company's site. Then at least you'll get counted in a way that matters.
But I think most people who watch TV 8 hours a day will have pretty small disposable income. For a family of four, going from 25K a year income to 50K a year income, the total income ratio is just 2, but the disposable income ratio is going to be something like 4 or even 8. The profit margins are huge in the disposable income expenditure. When it comes to bread, milk and gas, the profit margins are very tight. That means, it is better to snag 1 hour of a family with large income than to fight to get 8 hours from a low wage earning family.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We were a Nielsen family for a couple of years, up until about March. The amount of equipment that they attached to the TV and all the associated devices was staggering. We also had a TV in the bedroom that contained a DVD player. They took the TV apart and put lots of wires inside and a box on the outside. Some how they amanged to break a VCR during the installation, which they replaced. Both TVs in the house had a complete PC attached and ran a separate wireless network as well as connecting to the house phone lines. There were zillions of wires and lots of little boxes behind the TV. If the whole gamisch didn't call in daily to report on us for a day or two, the technician would schedule a visit and pound on his PC for an hour or so and then leave, satisfied that he's done something. Last March, during the Final Four, our old 1994 27" Sony Trinitron died and when I went shopping for a new TV, I decided that it was time for Nielsen to go. It was an interesting experience but I was very unimpressed with the complexity of their equipment. Now I know what a modern Rube Goldberg device looks like.
One thing to consider is that advertisers are already adapting to the use of DVRs. Yes, they still have commercials, but there is also a considerable amount of product placement. Consider the NBC show "Chuck" and its Subway product placement. Before the "Save Chuck" campaign even started, Subway maintained that this was their best product placement/commercial deal in years. It was well placed and quite amusing.
And guess who saw it. It wasn't just the old fogies who refuse to move into the modern age, but also the younger generation with our newfangled DVRs and PCs.
This is why having ALL of the ratings is important. Just because DVRs exclude most of the commercials, that doesn't mean that these viewers aren't important to the show's advertisers. The advertisers would just have to push into new ways of advertising outside of the standard commercial.
PS. I'll gladly sacrifice 2 minutes an episode to gain the 58 minutes of hilarity that is Chuck.
PPS. I know that the episode isn't really an hour long and that a bunch of time is cut out for commercials, but that's not the point.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
I want a step better. I want a web interfaced TV show, where at any point, I can pause the show, hover over something I see that I like, and have it tell me who makes it, and if I click on it, have it take me to a shopping site to buy the product. Now that would be effective product placement. Like that jacket? Buy it with a click. Think Fargo's car is cool? Click on it to find your local dealer. Think that maternity shirt is adorable? Order one for your wife within seconds if you enable Amazon's one click show based interface.
Want to just watch the show? Hey, it's commercial free, brought to you by Amazon.com - enjoy!
Think of the money that could be made on these types of impulse purchases?!
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