• by November 8, 2000

By Michael Kunkes

The baseball season may be over, but in the contest between broadcast and cable, it’s just beginning, according to the fall season’s first monthly report on prime time household ratings from the Television Bureau of Advertising.

In September, the first inning of TVB’s “level playing field” box score reporting format, ad-supported broadcast posted a 36.2 rating, compared to cable’s 25.1 in the first month of the new TV season. According to TVB, those numbers represent a 6.5% improvement for broadcast over its 34.0 rating in September 1999, and only a 1.6% increase for cable over its 24.7% rating in the same period last year.

“This bodes well for broadcast’s performance for the rest of the season, as more viewers are attracted to broadcast’s innovative lineup,” says Harold Simpson, VP of R&D for TVB.

TVB’s “level playing field” method of reporting Nielsen data wraps up all forms of ad supported broadcast, including network affiliates, Hispanic network affiliates and independent stations, and compares them to a Cable Advertising Bureau’s similar method of rating all ad-supported cable.

Providing a bit of history, Simpson says that the TVB’s baseball box score format was devised in 1997 as a response to CAB’s own Nielsen interpretations, which in many cases enabled CAB to preach that cable was closing the gap.

“CAB and Turner could put out news releases in which they chose what broadcast entities to compare to cable, and if you just looked at the headlines, you could be easily misled. The fact remains that for cable to achieve the kind of numbers that broadcast gets, advertisers would have to buy 50-70 outlets. We offer a legitimate counterforce to cable’s interpretations of the ratings.”

CAB may feel like TVB is playing dirty pool, but according to Simpson, they have nothing to say about it. “They have the same data we do, and can interpret it any way they want, just as we do. We’re not saying that cable is misrepresenting, but TVB’s feeling is that if you’re going to count your people, then count all of them. This format does level the playing field and get our message across.”

Encouraged by these numbers, Simpson adds that TVB is no longer so willing to concede the summer months to cable as it has been in the past. “We generally give away June through August, but not any more,” he says. “The success of fresh summer broadcast shows such as ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ may force us into extra innings next year.”

Michael Kunkes is a freelance writer for MediaPost MediaDailyNews