• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 7, 2010

A group of top media researchers believes it has come up with a pragmatic way to benchmark the audience delivery of TV networks that are not yet rated by Nielsen using actual tuning data from digital TV set-top devices. The approach, unveiled last week during a regular meeting of MPG's Collaborative Alliance in New York, follows months of research and analysis of digital set-top data, and how it may or may not correlate to Nielsen's ratings.

"This is directional," Mitch Oscar, executive vice president-televisual applications at MPG, and the host of the Collaborative Alliance meetings said, noting that several agencies, including MPG, Carat and Horizon Media, have indicated plans to begin applying the approach as a means of benchmarking the audiences of unrated networks.

"They said, 'We could work with this directionally'," Oscar said, adding, "This is not - I repeat, not - a data comparison."

Oscar likened the method to the process agencies have used historically to benchmark, or prototype the audiences of other new media outlets that are unrated by the industry's official audience measurement services, especially magazines not evaluated by Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI).

"We've been prototyping and estimating non-rated properties for years," said consultant Shari Anne Brill.

"This sounds like the old magazine model," said Joe Abruzzo, executive vice president-director of research at MPG. "In absence of better information, we are always looking for ways to benchmark."

Charlene Weisler, another consultant, who has helped organize the Collaborative Alliance's "Set Top Box Think Tank," which came up with the solution, likened it to a "ratio or a percentage."

The researchers showed two examples for comparing two Nielsen unrated networks - business news channel Bloomberg Television and kids TV network PBS Sprout - with the audience delivery of comparable Nielsen-rated networks.

In both cases, the executives added up the combined Nielsen ratings of the rated networks, and compared it to the unrated networks' audience share among the same set of networks in Rentrak's digital set-top database.

In the case of business news channels, Bloomberg was estimated to have about a 4% share of the group's audience delivery. In the case of children's networks, PBS Sprout was estimated to have about a 9% share of the category's audience delivery.

Oscar reiterated that the findings are just "directional," and that agencies and networks still need to apply their own guidelines in terms of how they use the findings in their negotiations. He also noted that there are other important issues, such as "integrated" the data into Madison Avenue media processing systems such as Donovan Data Systems and MediaBank, which agencies use to calculate "post-buy" delivery and pay the media.

Not everyone present during the Collaborative Alliance meeting was enthusiastic about the method. Consultant and long-time industry researcher Tony Jarvis said the approach may actually be misleading, calling it "puerile and consequently specious.

"As the former chairman of the ARF's Magazine Prototype Committee back in 2002-03, while I was at Mediacom, [we] identified an extensive series of principles and processes that would assist the industry in developing 'meaningful' magazine prototypes - a common estimating procedure even today and a guideline that would indeed be invaluable to TV.

"Taking a leaf from magazine prototyping was mentioned by this [Collaborative Alliance's Set Top Think Tank]. Apparently, they took just that, a leaf from magazines when many pages from these Guidelines would have served them better."