• by October 19, 2000

In the biggest expansion since the launch of its competitive advertising intelligence service - Monitor-Plus - Nielsen Media Research announced today that its coverage of broadcast television commercials has increased from top 75 markets to encompass all U.S. television markets. The services launched on September 25.

Monitor-Plus continues, of course, to report all broadcast television commercials activity in the top 75 markets. The significant expansion in coverage, which began last month, encompasses 440 additional TV stations, distributed in 135 additional markets. These additional markets alone account for more than one-fifth of total U.S. TV households, representing $1.6 trillion in annual retail spending.

"Advertisers have long sought access to competitive advertising intelligence in all markets - for good reason," said Dave Thomas, managing director of Monitor-Plus. "Collectively, these markets pack a tremendous economic wallop, larger than that of such major foreign countries as France and the U.K. With the breakthrough, for the first time, advertiser, agencies and station groups will have the ability to analyze the complete U.S. television marketplace for themselves and their competitors."

The ability to track TV commercial activity associated with all registered commercials in every market in which they appear has been enabled through the introduction of Nielsen Media Research's new metering technology, developed in conjunction with the ratings service's core TV audience measurement business.

For the first week of the expanded service, for example, 1.2 million additional television commercials were tracked, analyzed and reported across broadcast television stations just in the additional markets, Nielsen says, This total amounted to more than 40% of the total number of broadcast television commercials derived from monitoring of Spot, Network and Syndication clearances throughout the United States. On an annualized basis, the 1.2 million additional commercials translate into approximately 65 billion commercial messages.

This new-found capability not only notes commercial occurrences by brand, by advertiser and be creative execution, it also incorporates the same rich contextual data, inducing audience delivery and spending estimates, formerly limited to the largest TV markets.

To illustrate further, while Coca Cola placed nearly 900 announcements in Spot Television in the largest markets during the week of September 25, that total represented less than half of the 2,100 spots places in local television on Coke's behalf throughout the entire U.S.

In the case of Ford, during the same week, its Dealer Association accounted for more than 7,500 local spots just in the additional markets, amounting to an outlay of more than $1.5 million, translating into a annualized spending total of almost $80 million, more of it reportable until now.

Art Tatnell, director of media information at Bates Worldwide, said, "this m