Week in Review

Wow, what a week! All sorts of news:

Claire Atkinson of AdvertisingAge reports that AC Nielsen is entering the set top box market:

The big question facing Mr. Meyer is whether Nielsen can deliver on the promise quickly. “Talk to anyone and they get my sense of urgency. We know we need to move fast, and [Nielsen Media Research President-CEO] Susan Whiting gets it. Her directive is to make this happen quickly. It is critical to our future,” he said.

With so many competitors entering the set-top box market (Google even has a set-top box now and should already be generating numbers) Nielsen had better figure out how to get to market otherwise they may begin to lose their stranglehold on the media metrics market.

“Nielsen’s advantage is having a finger in other parts of the pie,” said Ira Sussman, Cable Advertising Bureau’s senior VP-research. “People want to know what’s happening in the household from every single source. That’s a tough nut to crack. TNS also has a great product and competition is what’s going to help things move faster.”

I submit that Nielsen has a whole lot more than a finger in the pie, they are practically sitting in the pie. They are now incetivized and empowered by current backing from private equity firms that own a majority stake in Nielsen. With all of the information and tactics that Nielsen has learned in their lawsuit of ErinMedia one would think they might have an idea  of how to get to market.

That said some are already holding memorial services for ErinMedia, check out this awesome article by Joe Mandese at MediaPost. I think this article is important enough that I am going to copy the text and place a second link at the bottom of this post, it is well worth your time to take a second and look it over.

Other articles of interest:

Bill Gates on local advertising: Yellow Pages gone in 5 years

TV most effective for marketing new products: study

Movie Studios, Retailers Balk at ‘Live Plus Three’ - More news about UpFront

Full Copy of MediaPost article by Joe Mandese:

Memorial Day

IT’S FRIDAY AFTERNOON BEFORE MEMORIAL Day, and I cannot think of a more fitting TV Board entry than to conduct an informal memorial service for an important part of the TV industry that seems to be passing on. No, this is not in recognition of those who have risked their lives in defense of our nation — though they clearly deserve to be recognized and honored for what they’ve done. This column is written in acknowledgement of those who have dedicated their lives in defense of our nation’s most powerful medium: television. Their weapons of choice were not rifles, grenades, or mortar fire. They were pocketpieces, meters and some analytical firepower. But they fought some important battles nonetheless, and their departure is as symbolic of the changes taking place in television as anything else. The most recent to depart is Tim Brooks, the long-time research chief at Lifetime Television, who has spent a lifetime keeping the TV ratings business honest. Brooks hasn’t actually departed yet, but he’s announced that he’ll retire at the end of this year, marking an end to a 30-year career that spanned NBC, USA Networks, and NW Ayer. Along the way, he has played key roles on industry oversight committees and councils that have set standards, policies and guidelines that have kept the business of TV ratings fair, balanced and as accurate as they possibly could. Brooks was always the voice of reason, and usually one of calm, during even the most contentious industry debates. And despite his devotion to numbers crunching, he somehow found time to serve as the industry’s de facto historian, author of the definitive reference book on the subject: The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows. Brooks is not alone. At least two other longtime TV numbers-keepers – Turner Broadcasting’s Michael Propper and Time Warner’s Phyllis Liebert — also retired this year, and some other important industry voices such as Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research Inc.’s Gale Metzger, have simply grown quiet. And I find it telling that the most dynamic voice in the TV ratings business in the past year has come from an outsider — erinMedia’s Frank Maggio, now an occasional contributor to this board — who has been both brave and brash enough to take on Nielsen when so many have failed before him. The real danger, KN/SRI’s Metzger tells me, is the loss of “institutional” history about the TV ratings business, “and the knowledge of all the errors we made in the past and the risk of reliving them again.” Metzger, no big fan of the current direction of the TV ratings business — and especially of a Nielsen Co. controlled by private equity firms more interested in cash flow and profits than research quality — says he actually fears current trends will push people in the direction of more proprietary research. “If I were the head of a major advertiser spending a lot of money on television, I’d invest more of my money on custom research, and rely less on syndicated research,” he says. “If you’re going to invest $100 million in advertising, you have to allocate something to realistically understand what you’re getting for that.” But this column is not about the partisan issues surrounding the TV ratings wars. It is about the people like Metzger and Brooks who fought those battles with conviction, with purpose and with a great sense of moral consciousness. Some have literally passed on recently, including long-time Nielsen chief statistician Ed Schillmoeller. Others, like Brooks, have retired. Still others have simply left the business, like Madison Avenue’s Joanne Burke, Mary Ellen Vincent and Stacey Lynn Schulman, or have moved into research vendor roles like David Marans and Jon Swallen. I’m not saying there aren’t still vital voices on the TV ratings front. CBS’ Dave Poltrack and NBC Universal’s Alan Wurtzel are as vocal as ever, as is Turner’s Jack Wakshlag. It’s just that the debate seems to be losing some of its resonance as the chorus begins to dwindle. So I find the timing of Brooks’ retirement symbolic. It comes as both TV measurement methods, as well as the medium itself, are undergoing radical change. So maybe, just maybe, an entire era of TV audience measurement has passed on, and we’ve just been too preoccupied to notice, as Brooks might suggest, its final episode. “Whether it’s ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Dallas’ or ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ even the longest-running television series eventually comes to an end, as does this phase of my work in television,” Brooks said when announcing his retirement earlier this week. While he plans to keep writing about the medium, we’ll miss his whining about the medium behind-the-scenes. So please take a moment this weekend to reflect on those brave men and women who’ve fought hard to be the conscience of a medium. And if I’ve left any important names out of this entry, please add them in your comments to the Board. Joe Mandese is Editor of MediaPost.

Calling all CMO’s

The CMO Council just released a new report which is making waves in the ad world.

“When you talk about business acumen, people in marketing today absolutely have to have their eye on proving that their investments are working and having an effect,” said Tim Ellis, global advertising and media director for Volvo cars, who was not party to the survey. “There’s a difference between business acumen as it applies to sales. It’s not so easy to just compare the marketing to the number of sales.”
Adweek Article – CMO’s Left in Lurch

The gyst of the article is that CMO’s with agency experience are being replaced for CMO’s with a broader list of corporate experience. Simply put the era of tagline’s is over. In order for a CMO to win over the rest of the executive committee he/she must be able to justify and demonstrate success on a spreadsheet (just like everybody else).

Blogger Jim Novo brought the report to our attention, and we wanted to give him due thanks.

As peoples means of consuming media changes our methods of tracking successes and failures has to adapt as well. We get excited as we read about marketers struggling to demonstrate success and actual interest to conversion. In my opinion that means that the old Guard of Media Inteligence is not fulfilling market demand. Mike Small of ‘Comment is Free‘ gives us our latest example of a changing in the guard:

Herald editor Charles McGhee dumped its traditional pollster, TNS System 3, on cost grounds, and hired a largely unknown and inexperienced market research company, MRUK.

The following excerpt from the adweek article (CMO’s Left in Lurch) strengthens our position that a new means of collecting and demonstrating media consumption is in order.

The study’s authors write that the credibility of CMOs has been further eroded by “self-described ’superstar marketers’ who leverage personal style to elevate and inflate their titles”—and salaries, which average between $300,000-500,000 in Fortune 500 companies, according to the study. But their perception within corporations is less flattering. According to board members surveyed, CMO failure was seen as resulting from their having “no real authority or clout in the organization” (59 percent) and “a lack of credibility and respect among key stakeholders” (54 percent).

So how do CMOs gain cred? Not by touting taglines but by crunching numbers, becoming “quant jocks” in the model established by CMOs at CapitalOne and Dell, then proving to their boards that their marketing is working, said Tim Furey, CEO of MarketBridge, Bethesda, Md.

On that point, the survey found CMOs have work to do: 62 percent of board members disagreed that their marketing leaders were providing adequate ROI data. Yet the study confirmed that CMOs with greater quantitative focus and measurement emphasis have a significantly longer expected tenure, “greater than 20 percent longer,” said Furey.
Adweek Article – CMO’s Left in Lurch

We are sure that Julie Roehm would like to weigh in on the issue; we would love to hear your feedback Julie.

ErinMedia, Google, and Joost

Here is the news – Landmines and a Land-Office Business

It appears to be final that ErinMedia’s financing has fallen through. We have mixed emotions on this, we get excited to see interest in the space. However, It is daunting to watch from the near sidelines as the Google Juggernaut has laid waste to an inferior product, I have hammered on why this technology is inferior and destined to fail.

I wanted to point out a couple of faults with the set-top box model.

Joost – btw…We would love an invite to Joost if you can spare one let us know. We will try to find a way to make it worth your while.

NextNewNetwork

YouTube

MP3 Players

I could keep going but I think you get the point. Time is short and sleep is necessary (at least in small amounts).

Another One Bites the Dust

Erinmedia, a company that we have blogged about in the past just lost one of their founders/lead analysts to GM’s media buying group, GM Planworks. This comes at a rather inopportune time for ErinMedia, they were in the middle of raising a fund to continue their lawsuit against Nielsen. However, prior to Vinson’s departure the lead investor decided to hold off on closing the round, to date I have not heard if the round of funding was completed or not.