• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, October 5, 2011

Three years after the national TV advertising marketplace shifted to C3 ratings -- live average commercial minute ratings plus three days playback viewing -- the system was finally accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC). A year after that, the rest of the world found out.

The lag time between the accreditation and its full disclosure raises many questions about transparency in the current ratings system, the role of the MRC and why Nielsen itself was so lackadaisical in confirming the news, earlier this year. Those issues were given a thorough airing at MPG's Collaborative Alliance session held Wednesday as part of the Advertising Week activities in New York.

Ratings accreditation for an audience measurement service, a process that was established by Congress in the early 1960s, is the equivalent of getting an investment-grade financial rating from Fitch or Standard & Poor's. It provides a seal of approval for measurement systems, which in the early days weren't just unreliable, but sometimes fraudulent -- some numbers were actually made up. That's why Congress held hearings in the first place -- to ensure that ad buyers had some reasonably accurate method to verify that they were getting what they paid for.

The point is that accreditation is a pretty big deal for ratings systems. Nielsen and Arbitron and others are usually quick to pull the trigger on an announcement when one of their systems receives it.

But with the C3 accreditation, it was almost as if none of the parties involved -- particularly Nielsen and the MRC -- cared enough to announce the news. Why?

George Ivie, executive director of the MRC, said that all audience measurement services that receive accreditation are listed on the group's Web site. That's true, but it takes a little digging -- if you go to the Web site, click on the "about us option" and scroll to the last item, you'll find the list, with close to 100 different accredited systems across various media.

But the organization wasn't designed for and doesn't devote a lot of resources to public relations, Ivie said. A look at their Web site verifies that. Since 2003, the group has issued 17 releases and statements related to its work -- about what NBC or CBS put out in a day.

And it certainly isn't the MRC's job to do Nielsen's PR, Ivie said. "It was kind of unusual that they didn't" put out a release announcing the C3 accreditation news, he asserted. Or at least a dedicated release to the C3 news. Nielsen did throw in a line in a June 2010 release about receiving accreditation for certain local ratings services. But the line referred to a "renewal" of accreditation for the C3 system, when it was actually the first time the full service received that approval. Nielsen declined to elaborate at the time on its lack of a separate release for the accreditation of the national C3 system.

But what Ivie did do shortly after the MRC granted C3 accreditation was participate in Nielsen's annual client meeting in 2010, where he confirmed the news. "We could be more proactive," on the PR front, Ivie told the Collaborative Alliance attendees.

What about full disclosure? That is making the system audits that lead to accreditation (or not) public as opposed to just acknowledging when a system is granted accreditation.

Ivie's response: probably not going to happen. But veteran researcher and ratings system developer Gale Metzger, also speaking at the Collaborative Alliance event, argued that the audits should be disclosed. "I've always argued for full disclosure and open audits," Metzger said. "It forced me to do better. It should be an open process."

At one point during the session, John Dimling, a former executive director of the MRC and also former CEO of Nielsen, stood up from the audience and supported Metzger's position. In fact, he said, during his tenure as MRC head -- from 1982 to 1985 -- audits were available to people who were willing to come to the MRC offices to inspect them. It was a policy he invoked, he said, in an effort to dispel the notion that the MRC process was secretive one, akin to the "smoke filled room" where political elections are decided.

But Ivie said the problem now is that there are too many players in the audience measurement space who compete against each other. Open audits, he suggested, would implode the process because not a lot of companies would "pay for an audit that discloses trade secrets." And while the approval is nice to have, it's not legally required.

After the formal session, Ivie noted that during Dimling's tenure as head of the MRC thirty years ago, there were a handful of audits of systems -- measuring analog systems -- "that never changed. Last year we did seventy audits of systems from vendors that are all competing." And many involved digital measurement, where the systems are being constantly upgraded to achieve better results, he said.