• by David Kaplan , April 1, 2005

Convenience and control mean everything to today's consumer and unless advertisers, agencies and broadcasters make that ethos part of everything they do to reach viewers, they'll be lost amid a growing sea of digital video recorders, and Nielsen will be there to count the diminishing eyeballs with greater accuracy, executives from the reporting company said Thursday.

The remarks were made separately in a presentation entitled, "TV Research at the Crossroads," at the Television Bureau of Advertising's 2005 Marketing Conference, which was held at the Jacob Javits Center in New York.

While it took years for technologies such as television, cable and satellite to gradually take hold, DVRs and DVD players have achieved enormous market penetration in the U.S. thanks to aggressive electronics manufacturers in China and South Korea, said Scott Brown, senior vice president-strategic relations, marketing and technology at Nielsen.

"DVR penetration is currently at 5 percent of U.S. households, but it will be at 25 percent by the end of 2006," Brown said. "In particular, there are 21 million video-on-demand households right now in the US, and they will number 30 million by the end of next year. Control and convenience are the watchwords of today. But those words mean nothing without content. And you are the ones who largely determine what the content is. So the future of this business is up to you to a certain extent and the decisions you make now about how to deal with consumers' demand for control and convenience."

Following Brown's presentation of what consumers' priorities are, Paul Donato, senior vice president and chief research officer at Nielsen, mapped out Nielsen's priorities for the next year.

"Electronic measurement of local markets is what we're focused on right now," Donato said. "We also want to increase the sample sizes. This month, we've installed active/passive meters in local markets and it's more accurate than anything else that's out there."

There are three components to Nielsen's experiments for improving its local research, Donato said. The first is local people meters, which will number about 10 markets by the end of the year; the potentially portable people meters, which Nielsen will decide whether to move forward with them over the next several months; and finally "mailable" people meters, which are being tested now.

"We can treat [mailable people meters] as an electronic diary or just a low-cost people meter. We're going to have the first field tests this summer to see which direction we should go in. mailable meters could certainly help in enlarging our local samples."

Lastly, Nielsen is considering measuring TV viewing "beyond the home," where the research company will look at college dorms and student living, as well as vacation homes.

"There are several markets that seem to have meaningful amounts of viewing in both those areas, but we're still in the talking stages when it comes to that," Donato said.