• by Paul Gough , August 20, 2003

As if the broadcast networks weren't already agonizing over the erosion of GRPs, last week's blackout led Nielsen Media Research to shave three days off its prime-time ratings averages for the week of Aug. 11-17. It is the first time in recent memory Nielsen has failed to release such a report without a seven-day average.

But that didn't seem to faze networks or agencies, who didn't think the results were going to have much of an impact in the dog days of August, when there isn't much original programming and ratings are down anyway.

"You look at it as an atypical week and you don't put too much emphasis on it because obviously a lot of major cities weren't able to watch television Thursday night into Friday," said Brad Adgate, senior vice president and director of research at Horizon Media.

"If it had happened premiere week or the second week of the broadcast season, it would have been much more impactful," Adgate said. A network executive agreed, adding that sweeps would have been another bad time.

"We'd probably all be a little less sporting in such a case," the executive said.

NBC spokesman Tom Bierbaum said this week's changes to the ratings system wasn't causing much concern at the network, despite losing a strong Thursday that included another episode of Bravo's "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" on the broadcast network.

The Nielsen ratings report for the week was computed on a four-day average of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday's primetime shows. Nielsen decided earlier this week not to include data from Thursday through Saturday, citing unreliable in-tab rates from the Northeast and Midwest.

National people meter sample homes providing usable data were 4,398 last Thursday (in-tab rate of 85.7%), 4,455 on Friday (in-tab rate of 86.8%) and 4,558 on Saturday (in-tab rate of 88.8%). The average in-tab rate for the seven days prior was 92.3%. Rates returned to normal Sunday.

"We flagged all the programs from those days and we did not include those programs in either the weekly averages or the season-to-date averages, but we did release the data," said Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus. Nielsen said the sample characteristics from the affected areas were "highly irregular" and it wasn't just one daypart off. He said households went out at different times, returned to power at different times and some came on then lost power again.

"It was a hodgepodge," Loftus said. Data from Thursday through Saturday have been released as breakouts.

But even without such top 20 stalwarts as Friends, CSI, Will & Grace, ER, Without a Trace and even UPN's wrestling programming, the weekly prime averages released Wednesday didn't vary all that much from a year ago. CBS (5.9/10, 8.42 million viewers) still carried the week in total households and viewers and NBC still won in adults 18-49. The other networks performed just about or slightly down from a year ago in those demographics.

But instead of a repeat of CSI or Friends leading the pack, it was Everybody Loves Raymond (7.8/13, 8.33 million) and 60 Minutes (7.4/14, 7.9 million) as the week's top primetime programs. Who Wants To Marry My Dad? (7.3/13, 7.8 million) came in third. The remainder of the top 10 were CSI: Miami, King of Queens, Big Brother 4: Wednesday, 60 Minutes II, Law & Order, and a four-way tie for ninth place between 48 Hours Investigates, Big Brother 4, For Love or Money 2 and Law & Order: SVU.

The national numbers were several days behind schedule as Nielsen went to the networks to make sure it had gotten lineup information correct. Some of it had changed as networks and local stations went to emergency coverage and pre- empted regular programming.

Nielsen has dealt with power outages, due mostly to storms, in local metered markets. In those cases, Nielsen may have not released data or delayed data depending on the number of sample homes. But this is the first time in anyone's memory - or at least since Nielsen went to an all-metered sample in 1987 - that Nielsen has had to take these types of measures.

"On a national basis, we've never had anything like this before," Loftus said.