Commercial Ratings: A Tutorial

Post by **Paramvir** » Sun Aug 13, 2006 10:20 am

Commercial Ratings: A Tutorial
Feeling Lost? You're Not Alone. Read the MediaWorks FAQ for Answers

By Claire Atkinson

Published: August 11, 2006
NEW YORK (AdAge.com)-- Feeling lost amid all the talk about commercial ratings? You're not alone. Players on both sides of the table who buy and sell TV spots for a living cannot agree on the best way to determine how many people watch TV ads. One media buyer even told us he'd like to try to explain the complexities of moving from the longstanding program ratings to a commercial rating system but admitted it would probably be too boring. Still, it's an issue that's going to be with us for a while, and we want to help you get your head around it before November, when the new "average commercial minute per program" data from Nielsen Media Research come out and really get everyone confused. So let's start at the beginning.

Just what are commercial ratings?
In an ideal world, a commercial rating would be the precise number of viewers who saw a TV spot, whether it ran for one second or 10 seconds or 30 or 60. But Nielsen doesn't provide second-by-second ratings. It provides minute-by-minute data, and that's as close as advertisers have been able to get to a measure of how many people are watching during commercial breaks. Since most commercial spots tend to be 30 seconds long, not a full minute, the ratings don't drill down far enough to let marketers know if their ads indeed were watched. Part of that minute could have been taken up by network promos for shows, public-service announcements or local ads. And that's just one of the problems.

So what's new?
Why is everyone so mad about that?
Why would he do that?
Won't the networks lose money?
What about the cable guys?
And the syndicators?
Where are the media agencies in all this?
What's Nielsen's response?
A spokesman last week said: "Meeting with the relevant client constituencies is entirely appropriate. We look forward to constructive proposals on how we can measure commercial minutes."
So is there any consensus?