Nielsen Botches Digital Cable Ratings, Will Reissue Data For Most Of The Season

Nielsen Media Research late Friday sent a notice to clients informing them that it has incorrectly reported digital cable TV ratings for most of the 2004-05 television season. The announcement, which was inexplicably sent out after the close of business on Friday, was described by one Nielsen customer as "horrendous."

The SNAFU, which affected Nielsen's so-called MarketBreaks service--a Web-based system used by clients to analyze various TV ratings--mistakenly assigned data for "digital cable with pay" market breaks to "digital cable without pay" market breaks, and vice versa from Nov. 1, 2004 through Feb. 2, 2005.

Nielsen said the glitch impacted ratings for both breaks, as well as aggregate ratings for digital cable when they are combined.

While Nielsen did not characterize the overall magnitude of the error, it said: "The impact varies greatly in size and direction from program to program and half-hour to half-hour," and advised clients not to use "any digital cable data that they may have run in MarketBreaks for these dates."

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Also unclear was the potential financial impact of the mistake. The precise magnitude of the impact on ad deals may never be known, says one client, noting that it would depend on "the number and size of the deals that have been made to date with these data."

However, the impact for new cable networks could be significant, because the data are integral to the strategic planning and capital decisions of digital cable networks. "In addition to the costs to advertisers and agencies that need to considered, one also needs to ask what will be the cost to investment firms and the other businesses that relied on these data for critical business analyses and judgments," says the irate Nielsen customer.

Nielsen said it is currently in the process of re-running viewing data for digital cable, and that it would make corrections of the data in weekly intervals, beginning with the most recent week and "working backward in time."

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