• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 9, 2009

In a crammed Midtown Manhattan conference room, a small, but influential group of TV and advertising industry executives met this week to share some of the latest developments in the race to tap the burgeoning digital set-top universe to enhance TV audience measurement. The group, which was convened as part of an ongoing series of similar meetings by an ad agency, Havas' MPG unit, included researchers from top ad agencies and cable TV networks, who heard pitches on the latest developments from four leading set-top data firms: Macrovision, Rentrak, TiVo and WPP-owned TNS. Noticeable by its absence was Nielsen Co., which has been developing its own set-top measurement initiatives, even as it maintains its lock as the industry's ratings "currency" via older - some might argue - antiquated systems.

The purpose of this week's MPG Collaborative Alliance meeting, said organizer Mitch Oscar, was to enable "researchers to talk to the technology companies" so that they can understand what the end-users ultimately want from the new data providers. Oscar, who has the title of executive vice president-televisual applications at MPG, played MC during the meeting, facilitating the discussion and eliciting questions from top researchers, even included an executive from a rival agency that competes with MPG, including Carat's Shari Ann Brill. Oscar, of course, began the collaborative alliance concept at Carat, and brought it over to MPG last year when his former boss and benefactor David Verklin left the agency to run Canoe Ventures, the cable industry initiative that is supposed to be doing the kinds of things the informal alliance is: organizing competing, often divergent industry stakeholders to build a consensus around the next generation of TV audience measurement.

This week's discussion included a lively debate over the importance of "representativeness, a term used to describe whether a sample of any kind - even a "census-level" sample derived from a digital set-top universe - truly represents the universe it is intended to measure. That issue has been championed by former Lifetime Television research chief Tim Brooks, now a consultant, and everyone agreed it is the chief methodological issue in the digital set-top discussion. But Jim Spaeth of consultant Sequent Partners, said it is not an unanswerable one, and that the industry can easily develop the means of determining that once it understands what it actually wants to measure. Based on what the four vendors showed at the meeting, there are a virtually unlimited number of measurement possibilities already emerging from the set-top data developments.

Bob Pares, vice president-audience research & measurement, at DVR firm TiVo, for example, revealed some new bells and whistles coming out of TiVo's StopWatch audience measurement service, including a new application developed for agency media auditing firm Media IQ. The new app, called Viva, enables the auditor and its clients to watch the live video of a TV program to see where the second-by-second behavior of its audience is fluctuating, especially when viewers pause, replay or fast-forward through commercials.

"During the program, we are seeing huge amounts of fast-forwarding," Pares said. "We see an awful lot of people who choose to fast-forward or rewind through the spots."

Pares showed other "gotta haves," new applications developed by TiVo to dimensionalize TV audience behavior in ways that might have been unimaginable under Nielsen's traditional TV ratings. One of them, for example, ranks how much commercials are fast-forwarded through on a product category basis. Pares showed that alcohol ads index 12% better than the industry average, while retail ads index 7% below.

Another TiVo application produces similar indexes on the basis of specific campaigns within a product category so that Lexus can see how well its spots are performing relative to, say, General Motors'.

Pares acknowledged that "representativeness" was a key issue, but he also noted that DVRs are now present in two-thirds of households with incomes of $100,000-plus, and noted that advertisers and programmers need to understand how TV audiences behave in a DVR universe. Among other things, he said TiVo has found that so-called addressable commercials - TV spots that are relevant to specific types of viewers - do not perform as well as many people might think in a DVR environment.

Both Rentrak President Ken Papagan, and TNS Media Research President George Shababb, said it also is important to think of the new data as being more than just "set-top" data, but as one component of a new array of data streams being derived from a variety of new video platforms that also include online and mobile video.

"We call it return path data," Shababb said.

As important as access to the new data streams is, Shababb said the biggest issue in the business is not processing the data. "It's about how the data is being edited," and the business rules and guidelines the industry develops for valuing them.