• by April 16, 2004

HUMAN RIGHTS VS. NIELSEN'S RIGHTS: AGENCIES REMAIN MUM ON THE SUBJECT -- At last, the Riff finally understands the motive behind the deafening silence of the major ad shops during the political brouhaha leading up to Nielsen's decision to delay its New York people meter rollout. The decision was made because of a heavy PR and advertising blitz by organizers - and heavily backed, according to Nielsen, by Fox - that claimed Nielsen's New York people meter sample was biased against Hispanic and African Americans. Even though Nielsen has reams of data showing that not to be the case - in fact, the opposite is true - the media had a field day with the story as just about everyone piled on the story: broadcasters, minority group leaders and influential politicians. The one group that didn't weigh in on the issue, was the one that might have steered the conversation in a different direction: the major ad agencies who use Nielsen ratings data to invest more than $1 billion in local TV ad time in the New York market.

Never mind that the research chiefs of the major ad shops had signed off on the people meter switch long ago, the fact that it got tied to racial issues apparently was too sensitive an area for agencies to touch, even if it was erroneous. How does the Riff know this? Because some agency biggies told us. It seems that just as Fox was pulling the race card on Nielsen, some big New York-based agencies were being probed by regulators on that very topic.

"In New York City, several of our member agencies are in the midst of an investigation by the New York Human Rights Commission regarding minority employment and well-publicized public hearings later this year are likely," Burtch Drake, president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies acknowledged during his opening remarks at the association's annual management conference in South Beach. If the connection is true and if Fox actually figured that one out, we give them even more credit than we had before. The move was brilliant and effectively shut down any Madison Avenue opposition to the issue. We just hope the whole civil rights thing is cleared up before Fox goes into round two of its anti-people meter campaign.

Meanwhile, Drake said the agency business is hurting in many other ways, including new efforts to tie food advertising to obesity and continued efforts to put pressure on alcohol and beer advertising. And then there's the "never-ending and increasing battles at the state level vis-à-vis ad taxes" said Drake, calculating that the whole mess adds up to "another very challenging year ahead of us--but certainly nothing as bad as what the business went through post the dot-com implosion and 9/11."

Since 9/11 Drake said the AAAA itself has been adversely impacted in terms of its own bottom line. "We've seen our total revenues decline some $2.7 million dollars versus fiscal year 2000-2001--a 16.8 percent decrease," he said, noting that the AAAA has been hit by a double whammy of declining membership dues and a drop in conference revenues.

And even though financial and business administrative matters would appear to be acutely important to the trade association right now, Drake said the AAAA also opted to bump its traditional "business meeting" from this year's management conference, because it had become "boring and rote" and that "no one but the AAAA Board of Directors, some staff members and Stuart Elliott attended." It seems that the life of a New York ad columnist is not nearly as glamorous as the Riff had thought.