• by Wayne Friedman , December 13, 2005

Competitive ad tracking firm TNS Media Intelligence Monday announced plans to begin monitoring local cable TV advertising on systems in major markets beginning in March 2006.

The first markets to be measured will be San Francisco and Boston. TNS will provide network, category, advertiser, brand, and number of commercial units. The initial data from those two markets will be available in April 2006.

For years, advertisers, agencies and competing broadcast TV station sales managers had the difficult task of determining the level of local advertising sales in each market.

Local cable television advertising data has always been tough to determine. Even the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau doesn't release local advertising specific revenue data.

That's because of the sheer volume of commercials that are distributed across hundreds of cable channels across multiple time zones. TNS says it has solved the technological problems in determining local ad sales occurrences.

TNS measures some 19 other media categories, and local cable TV will be the 20th. TNS plans to expand to other markets.

"We'll be selecting the specific systems to be monitored by end of the month," says Jon Swallen, senior vice president-research of TNS. "A key consideration in system selection is to have geographic separation, in order to improve the odds of capturing ads that cleared in geographic zones."

Using San Francisco as an example, he says that could mean monitoring one system in the East Bay area (e.g., Oakland) and another system in the South Peninsula area (e.g., San Jose).

As important as it will be to begin getting an accurate picture of conventional local cable advertising sales, Swallen says TNS has no imminent plan to begin measuring one of the most dynamic areas of cable advertising growth: video-on-demand.

"We're not going to be monitoring VOD channels," he says. "The focus here is locally sold ads on national and regional cable networks. The list of networks in each market will be developed in conjunction with our clients."