Under mounting pressure to help distributors track evolving viewing opportunities, The Nielsen Co., which has itself been evolving, has collected data that measures the impact of DVRs and other time-shifting technologies on ads.
Claiming it’s delivering on a request for this information by customers last year, Nielsen has begun offering standardized ratings of television commercials.
Because of the increasing use of DVRs and the ability of consumers to fast-forward through commercials, Nielsen now provides a closer measure of the audience for commercials, not only when programs are viewed live but when played back as well.
Its initial efforts have revealed useful figures and conclusions to an audience that initially believed that ad-skipping technologies meant the end for advertising.
About 17 percent of households in the United States currently have DVRs, Nielsen said, adding that within these households 58 percent of broadcast prime time viewing takes place live with 42 percent occurring through some form of DVR playback. The firm said 95 percent of all prime time viewing within these homes takes place within three days of the live telecast.
The amount of cable and syndicated viewing that occurs via DVR playback is lower, with 85 percent of cable prime time viewing and 84 percent of syndicated programming taking place live, respectively, in DVR households, according to Nielsen.
Among all U.S. households, including those without DVRs, 90 percent of all broadcast prime time viewing among viewers age 18-49 occurs live. Again, the impact of DVRs on viewing cable and syndicated programming is lower, with 97 percent of all prime time viewing on cable seen live and 98 percent of all syndicated programming seen live.
Nielsen has been racing to keep pace with evolving audience measurement opportunities created by time and place shifting technologies as well as new types of content, such as gaming and video-on-demand. As part of its own transformation, the company has launched or plans to launch a series of services to get a grip on Internet video, gaming, VoD and even the habits of college students.
But Nielsen may not be moving fast enough for some ad buyers. In a keynote speech at the National Cable Television Association show early last month, Tony Ponturo, head of global sports marketing for Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc., expressed dissatisfaction with the dearth of tools provided by firms such as Nielsen, comments that drew strong applause from the large audience.
Nielsen is offering clients a new electronic data file that provides an average rating for the commercial minutes in each television program. This will be available back to April 30 and will cover six “streams” of viewing data, including live viewing; live viewing plus DVR playback on the same day; and live viewing plus DVR playback for one, two, three and seven days.
All broadcast, cable and syndicated programming will be included in the average commercial minute electronic data file, which supplements individual commercial minute ratings data already available in Nielsen’s NPOWER software and its All Minute Data File. These products enable clients to look at individual minute ratings, including commercial minutes, at any interval of DVR playback ranging from viewing delays of one minute to seven days.
“Today’s launch of average commercial minute ratings culminates a year-long effort to deliver a new way of measuring television viewing,” said Sara Erichson, executive vice president of client services for Nielsen Media Research, in prepared comments.
But the work doesn’t stop here as a series of cablecos including Cablevision Systems Corp., Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable have said they will offer network-based DVR services based on content stored in servers outside the home if a ruling blocking Cablevision from doing just that is overturned on appeal.
The Nielsen Co. www.nielsen.com
