• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 12, 2010

Nearly three years after introducing its average commercial minute ratings system as the currency for that national TV advertising marketplace, Nielsen Co. says it has made significant progress and improvements to its methods, some of which were not originally conceived to produce television audience ratings. But by its own admission, the system continues to "evolve" and is still less than completely accurate, even though billions of dollars of advertising buys are made on the estimates each year.

Most significant of all, Nielsen disclosed in a status report sent to clients this week that a significant number of client its clients still have not adopted procedures to self-report their commercial log data - a step Nielsen added when it became clear that its automated technology was not accurately capturing all of their commercial occurrences - and that it will soon begin blowing the whistle on them.

"For purposes of transparency, clients not submitting automated commercial logs will be disclosed for users' information," Nielsen disclosed in advisory sent to clients on Wednesday. "This includes clients who don't trade on C3 and therefore do not plan to provide logs. This weekly report will soon be available in the National Report Library."

Nielsen said about 20% of its clients still are not providing the commercial log data, and a spokesman said most of them are TV syndication companies, which frequently run their programming - and advertising - across an array of TV stations, and often with multiple airings in different time periods over the course of a week.

"Some of the biggest holes are on the syndication side," the spokesman said, adding that Nielsen is close to full compliance among cable TV networks, which initially were the most vexing source of problems with commercial log data, and the ratings that are generated from them. He said that the remainder of the cable network clients are expected to "sign on" in the next several weeks, and that from Nielsen's perspective the average commercial minute ratings data is already at a high level of accuracy, and will be getting higher as the remainder of its clients provide their commercial logs.

Nielsen estimates it currently is missing only about 2% of the commercials televised by its clients, and that many of those fall into "non-standard durations," such as 75-second commercials, that are not recognized easily by its pattern recognition software.

Nearly three years after their inception, Nielsen's average commercial minute ratings still are not accredited by the industry's ratings watchdog the Media Rating Council.