• by Wayne Friedman , December 19, 2005

Media agency Starcom MediaVest Group and cable network The Weather Channel have become the first clients to sign up for Nielsen Media Research's minute-by-minute data.

Minute-by-minute viewership ratings--sometimes also called commercial ratings--are data that advertisers have been requesting for years--all this to give them a more detailed picture of how their commercials are performing.

Because viewers tune into The Weather Channel in shorter time increments, the cable network will benefit by giving advertisers more detailed ratings, especially leading into and out of commercials. The deal will give all Starcom MediaVest Group's media units--Starcom, MediaVest, Starlink, Tapestry, and GM Planworks--access to the data. Minute-by-minute ratings have been made available before. Clients could get that information from Nielsen's NPower database. But a Nielsen spokeswoman said the data could only be used in limited configurations.

Media executives have debated the viability of minute-by-minute ratings. The increased viewership detail isn't stable, especially for smaller distributed cable networks. With Nielsen now measuring and reporting on 80 cable networks, granular detail from minute-by-minute data can show many inconsistencies, said one executive.

Unlike other Nielsen products, the new data doesn't really have a snappy name. It's just called the "minute-by-minute access data file." This data has been offered to the media in previous years. "But our clients thought it was overpriced," she said. "So we reconfigured it."