Madison Avenue Would Like To Press Pause On Nielsen Digital Set-Top Deals

Madison Avenue would like to hit the pause button on Nielsen's deals with TiVo, DirecTV and a growing list of gatekeepers of digital set-top tuner data. While the deals, such as one announced Thursday with DirecTV, offer potentially new insights about how people watch TV through digital set-top devices such as digital video recorders (DVR) or other cable or satellite TV boxes, ad executives say they are far more concerned with the threat represented by Nielsen gaining control over a new generation of TV usage data - data they believe is critically important to understand how, when, where and why consumers interact with TV programming and commercials, and what the effects are on advertising and marketing.

"We're afraid that cable operators are selling out," cautioned Richard Fielding, director of research at Starcom. Fielding was alluding to a concern that cable operators may be caving into pressure from Nielsen to form alliances on their digital set-top data in exchange for Nielsen muscling ahead with its local people meter rollout in key markets. The local people meters are believed to be a substantial improvement on ratings data for local and cable operators, which will level their advertising sales playing field with local broadcasters, and companies like Comcast have been especially supportive of Nielsen's LPM push.

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While agency executives generally agree that the LPMs do provide better data in those local markets in the short term, they fear they are mortgaging their future, as well as the future of an open data marketplace, by caving into Nielsen's demands to secure their digital set-top databases.

To be sure, no deals have yet been announced except for Nielsen's arrangements with TiVo and DirecTV, but Nielsen is known to be incredibly aggressive in its pursuit of cable and satellite operator data. Indeed, the deal with DirecTV only provides a modest improvement in terms of insights about DVRs, because it is essentially only another version of TiVo, which only represents about 20 percent of the DVR marketplace. Agencies say they are far more interested in what's going on in the rest of the DVR universe, which is controlled by cable and satellite operators.

"What's going on is a very short-sighted approach," said Starcom's Fielding. "They're doing things today because they believe Nielsen is the gold standard now, but they're not thinking about the future implications of these deals."

Madison Avenue, possibly through the American Association of Advertising Agencies, or the Advertising Research Foundation, is believed to be developing its own plan for ensuring the free and open access to digital set-top data, but executives said an announcement on its details was premature.

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