• Ad Age, Thursday, October 5, 2006 12:15 PM

NBC's research chief needs a lot of diplomatic skills, as he is the man who reviews more than 50,000 commercials, in addition to program content for the net's standards and practices division. "The thing that's challenging is that society is moving, and TV wants to be contemporary. But we have the FCC indecency thing hanging over us, and there's a bit of ambiguity," says Alan Wurtzel. He has also been in the news lately as a key player in the debate over commercial ratings, last month hosting the first commercial-ratings meeting at NBC in conjunction with Mediaedge:cia and urging participants to think of long-term interests of the industry. The commercial-ratings debate hinges on issues such as whether Nielsen Media Research is producing faulty data for cable, and whether advertisers want ratings based on an average performance per program or another metric. Wurtzel describes it and later exchanges as an "interesting psychological experiment."

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