• by Jim Meskauskas , March 10, 2004

Last week, Nielsen announced that it had plans to start looking at measuring households with digital video recorders (DVRs). To many in the media and ad business this seemed like a logical thing to do. The growth of the TiVo subscriber base--currently estimated to be at just over one million--and cable companies' inclusion of DVR capabilities with standard digital cable boxes necessitated that Nielsen, as a television ratings company, take action. By some estimates, there are currently around 3.5 million PVR/DVR households in the United States.

In spite of the proclamations I have made in this very space about DVRs and TiVo and their potential impact on television viewing, even I (yes, ME!) have ordered a box from Time Warner so I can begin to learn just what all the hype is about. Look for a mea culpa in the coming weeks.

Nielsen said that it will begin reporting time-shifted viewing data in its 55 local meter markets in April 2005, followed by its local people meter markets and national people meter sample in July 2005. Forget, for a moment, that I still cringe when I hear the term "time-shifted viewing." That's just a sci-fi sounding way of saying "watch recorded programming later." Playback data will be collected at the same time live viewing data is collected, but playback data will be gathered for seven days and combined with the live data, to then be released a week later.

But what Nielsen will not be providing is ratings at the level of granularity currently made possible by technology that already serves as the incidental underpinning of PVR/DVR technology.

As MediaPost reported last Friday in an article by Joe Mandese, agencies are asking that Nielsen provide, along with the aggregated program "viewing" data, minute-by-minute ratings data so that ratings can be attributed to ads themselves.

Doesn't this make sense? The only reason advertisers look at ratings for programming is because that is the only data made available to them. If we could get minute-by-minute ratings all this time, does anyone in the media planning and buying business doubt we would be using them? Just like demographics are surrogates for trends in psychographics and product usage, so program ratings are proxies for advertisement ratings.

TiVo, and in particular, cable companies offering digital services, are in a perfect position to provide the infrastructure for minute-by-minute ratings data. They have the technology, the scale, and they are already in your homes.

There is the issue of yielding demographic-specific data. In the short term, cable companies could do things like offer discounted or even free DVR service if members of a household were willing to offer up basic information about themselves as viewers. It is possible for various users to set up the DVR against different user profiles, recording the programming specified by a given user. Demographic data would offer just a tad more information. And think of it this way, since demographics are just stand-ins for specific yet less tangible dispositions, does it really matter that we have demographic data in the long run?

The exciting implications of having real, unmediated viewer-based ratings data is what it portends for accountability in media. For the first time, advertisers would be able to know whether an intended audience saw their ad. Imagine what this would mean to the way media companies are compensated for the audiences they purport to provide?

Well, lots of you reading this CAN imagine; it's pretty much how we've been doing online media all along. Accountability has meant, and continues to mean, everything. And this leads me to the other implication.

Once real viewing audience data becomes available and prices have to start being set accordingly, where do you think some of that money is going to go?

It's going to come to the Web, folks. Because soon enough, TV is going to be stuck with trying to figure out just what it means to be accountable and come up with evolved ways of demonstrating value. And while the TV groups do that, advertisers are going to come to a medium where many (though not all) of those problems are already being addressed.

Nielsen needs to find a way to partner with DVR service providers, be they cable companies, TiVo, or satellite TV firms. Fighting the advance, or averting it with distractions is not going to behoove it in the long run. Nielsen will end up looking like the recording industry in the face of peer-to-peer networking and the file-sharing that it enabled.

Agencies are right to ask Nielsen to provide minute-by-minute ratings. It's what smart media planning has always wanted and deserved but, until now, been unable to get at and ultimately resigned to receiving less. So in the mean time, agencies like Starcom are providing themselves with this information. Nielsen better hope agencies don't get too used to that.

It is no surprise that Nielsen is going to stall on providing this level of information. As many of you know, Nielsen has as much to gain from maintaining the status quo in television ratings methodology as do the networks. After all, the networks pay more for Nielsen ratings data than all advertising agencies do combined.

Neither Nielsen nor the networks, want us to open the door on minute-by-minute ratings and let in that cool breeze. No one in the room is wearing any clothes after all.