• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 4, 2006

In the weeks since Nielsen revealed plans to begin providing ratings for TV advertising minutes significant problems have emerged in the way those ratings are processed. Now a coalition of influential buyers and sellers wants to put the brakes on that process before it gets out of hand and is planning a meeting to rethink how the so-called commercial ratings should be manufactured. The meeting, which is expected to take place next month, before the launch of the new TV season, and before Nielsen begins doling out the new ratings, will likely lead to a new round of discussions on what data should - and should not - go into the commercial ratings, how they should be processed, disseminated and used in TV advertising deals.

"I don't think there's anyone out there who thinks that Nielsen has a full grip on this," acknowledges Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development at NBC, who is one of the executives trying to organize the summit. We need to find a forum in which the industry can get together and start to deal with some of these details."

The effort, which is also being organized on the agency side by Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer at Mediaedge:cia, is expected to take place in the next four to six weeks and will likely have all sides of the business represented, including advertisers, agencies, broadcast and cable networks, as well as Nielsen executives.

"In order to make this viable, the whole industry has to be involved - both buyers and sellers," says Lyle Schwartz vice president-director of research and marketplace analysis at Mediaedge:cia, who along with Scanzoni was a major catalyst prompting Nielsen's initial plan to begin releasing commercial minute ratings beginning this fall.

But in the weeks that followed a surprise announcement by the major broadcast networks that they had achieved a consensus on how those ratings should be processed, other players in the industry have been scrambling to make sense of the plan, and some have found it lacking, especially big ad agencies and major cable networks.

One of the chief problems surrounding the new ratings is that the commercial ratings are processed by using a relatively shaky system for identifying when the commercial minutes actually air. That system, Nielsen's Monitor-Plus service, was designed as a competitive advertising monitory system, which apparently does not have the same level of detail or rigor as the systems Nielsen uses to compile and process TV ratings.

The Monitor-Plus data, for example, currently cannot identify local cable advertising units, and also does not even monitor a number of major cable TV networks at all. The data is also considered unstable by some major cable networks, one of which recently ran several tests of commercial minute ratings using the system, which failed to identify the correct advertising units.

Without an accurate accounting of when the commercial minute run, critics say it would be impossible for Nielsen to accurately produce TV ratings that could be used as the basis of a marketplace currency for negotiating and guaranteeing advertising deals.

Other significant technical issues have been identified, but another major stumbling block to the plan is that the Monitor-Plus data has not been audited and is not accredited by the Media Rating Council, the organization that validates audience measurement currencies for the advertising and media industries.

Mediaedge:cia's Scwhartz says the goal of the summit is to identify the problems and pitfalls in the new commercial minutes ratings before they become established as a new market currency, and to come up with a consensus for a plan to produce them accurately.

Conceivably, he says, that might mean using an alternate source for the commercial minutes data, such as Nielsen rival TNS Media Intelligence, though at least one network insider believes that is unlikely to occur.

"Nielsen probably has the ability to fix those problems and refine the data to give it the kind of granularity we would need to process commercial ratings," says the executive. "They just haven't been asked to do it before."