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.

Upfront Season

We are in the final weeks of what could be called the 9th Upfront Season. How broken is this system,? Let’s Review:

For the newbies out there Upfront is not held to one specific conference or power meeting of all media brokers. Rather, it is a time of year that has evolved with and coincides with AC Nielsen’s Sweeps Month (this is the same reason that we all have season finales and sensational local news twice a year – to help inflate numbers and viewers temporarily so Networks can sell ad space for top dollar). The numbers that AC Nielsen generates and reports will largely determine how advertising dollars get spent, currently $9 billion in just prime time tv. Some organized events that try to take advantage of the time of year where so many dollars are being exchanged are becoming more and more evident (Television Week).

Networks take advantage of the season and some of the events to show off stars and woo buyers (a bit of gossip – The cast of the The Office was being trumpeted around to touting their success when one of the stars fell down a set of marble stairs and broke some of the vertebrae in her back – we get the feeling that NBC was trying to hard to show off it’s couple of hits).

Other big talk this year is time-shifting, a fancy way of referring to DVR’s and recording shows to watch later. We have touched on the flaws of current time shifted viewer rating in one of our past postings, more to come so not to worry. Networks are saying we can guarantee fresh content to viewers in at least 3 days. Never mind the the fact that ABC has their show “Lost” online so viewers can watch past episodes, or the fact that somebody besides TiVO might make a DVR. We don’t have nay number just yet to refute the 3 day claim but, RawData just had a big break on some of our software development and we are much closer to providing accurate data.

At RawData we are hyper consumers of media and are excited to see where media buyers spend their dollars because those dollars dictate what will be broadcast in the coming season. Our vote, buy “Lost” and “The Office” – Don’t buy into “Dancing with the Stars” (contrary to what AC Nielsen is reporting nobody is watching).

Here is a link to a preliminary forecast of what is being canceled, what is going another season, and what is new for the individual networks.

Google, Echostar, and Media Consumption

Let’s start with the news:

Business 2.0 Beta

CNNMoney

Google has a warchest of capital and has decided to focus some of that into the media buying industry, specifically for television. At first glance, I viewed this as a threat to our incubated start-up around media metrics. Later on in the day, after I had spent some time letting the news sink in, the opportunities presented themselves.

Every time a potential competitor has shown up on the scene Nielsen has squashed them very quickly, good luck trying to step on and squash Google. The single greatest benefit, from our perspective, of Google’s endeavor into TV will be the heads that get turned. As advertisers and media focused industries get accustomed to Google they will warm up to the idea that other solutions to track media consumption exist. So, Google is blazing the trail and preparing minds for us.

The second real opportunity that came to mind was that Google is using a set-top box, reliant upon a dish provider, partnering like this will exclude a large portion of the market that does not use this specific provider. As a personal example, Television is my ‘crack.’ If I enter a room and the television is on I lose all sensory control and enter into a slightly comatose state. That reason alone is the why we have never had cable, also my wife would watch Law and Order non-stop; we have realized our lack of control and have determined to avoid it. Not to say that we do not consume media… we are avid listeners of radio, podcasts, online video content (Lost at ABC.com), Slingbox, and many others. This is where our startup shines, we can collect media metrics regardless of source.

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.

Broken Model

Combining the Mac Mini, Apple TV, and Steve Job’s continually calling for an open DRM it is painfully obvious that Apple is working it’s way into our entertainment centers (to learn more read this). From a marketing perspective this is a dream come true, Apple keeps scrupulous records of every move we make in i-Tunes – with Apple TV those same data points will be applied to the consumption of television media.

Talking to media consumption reporting. I submit that Apple will not allow the Portable People Meter (PPM) to embed the PPM coded stream in their broadcast content, they will probably make up some excuse along the lines of the ‘the embedded stream will take up too much bandwidth.’ This would in turn render Arbitron and ACNeilsen helpless in collecting data. Also, the set top solution, like erinmedia or TNS, will most likely run into some sort of technology conflict as well. Nielsen will invariably turn back to their diary model which I mentioned in my prior post, with the advent of technology and the ever changing means of media consumption all of these are broken models.

I submit that to more wholly understand consumers media consumption we need to collect data from a representative sample size of the market. The representative sample size of the market do not all use Apple TV, cable boxes, nor are they willing to accurately fill out a hand written diary – which leaves marketers bribing Apple, trying to get erinmedia or TNS to market and operational, and paying exorbitant ACNielsen fees, only to try and get a whole picture of what is being consumed and where. However, only one of these solutions can track time shifting (tivo or slingbox are a couple of examples of time shifted viewing) and none of them can track consumption that takes place outside of the home. Which leaves us with an obvious gap in tracking media consumption.