• September 25, 2007

In response to Monday's story ("Live Spots Killing Commercial Ratings, Nielsen Asks For Help -- Again"), a Nielsen spokesman said the company was unavailable for comment when a communiqué was being circulated over the weekend requesting clients provide log data on new commercial formats, including "live" commercials.

"Programmers are becoming more and more creative in the ways they communicate advertising messages, and in some instances these messages have become difficult to distinguish from program content," the spokesman said, adding, "Monitor-Plus' pattern recognition software looks for and recognizes what ads have always looked like. As programmers begin to change how commercials look and behave we are asking them to keep us appraised so we can recognize these new forms and know what to look for. This is especially true of the "live spot," where a program's host or actors deliver a commercial message within the program.

This request for commercial logs is not a new development. We been receiving logs from many clients for years in the normal course of business, and over the past year we've been enhancing and formalizing this process."