This Revolution Will Be Televised, If It Ever Happens

In the runup to the primetime network upfronts, when most of the next year's ad time is bought, media buyers and network reps were buzzing about a new Nielsen service that would tell advertisers how many people were watching their commercials, as opposed to the programs in which the ads appeared.

This data, called commercial ratings, would give the networks and advertisers a standard metric with which to appraise commercial space based on the average number of people who watched commercials in a show--and the stats would account for DVR-users. Until now, program ratings excluded DVR-users, who are presumed to skip commercials. And commercial ratings didn't exist.

What an exciting time to be in the industry! History is in the making.

But there's a catch. This potentially game-changing set of statistics wouldn't be released until May 31. That was two weeks after the networks' sales presentations ended--and, some speculated, too late for them to be used this year.

The impact, one way or the other, would be felt when the numbers were finally released. Yesterday was the day. Did you feel the earth shake? Probably not. Just one week's worth of data was released: April 30 through May 6, 2007.

That's not likely a big enough jolt to jumpstart the talks between the networks and their advertisers, which have been reported as moving quite slowly so far.

It's reasonable to believe that neither side will feel comfortable making million-dollar deals for a year's worth of advertising space if they have to settle on a price based on one week in spring 2007.

While it's not up to Nielsen to decide which set of stats the negotiators use, a spokesperson has said most of the industry agrees the numbers should be used for evaluation purposes. But during the upfront presentations, CBS was vocal about using the commercial ratings.

From here on out, another week's worth of data will be released by Nielsen on a weekly basis. People are just going to sit and wait until more data has been released, one media agency executive said. People will also need time to analyze the new stats before basing deals on them.

If these standardized commercial ratings aren't used, buyers and sellers could potentially try to do deals using a more complex and less-standardized data set already provided by Nielsen. Or the players could fall back onto the two primary options from last year: program ratings that include DVR viewers and program ratings that don't.

Marketers don't want to pay for viewers who could have fast-forwarded through commercials. Sellers want to count as many TV viewers as possible, including DVR viewers. Last year, marketers won. Who will get the best deal this year? Hard to say.

But if DVR viewers are included in the ratings used to appraise commercial time during this upfront negotiation period, it will go down in history as a first.

by Willow Duttge