There has been a lot of talk over the past year about the future of measurement and currency in the TV ad market. The “alt measurement movement” has been a hot topic in the ad trades,
on stages at industry events, and over cocktails and meals wherever industry peeps get together these days.
A number of companies, both on the sell side and buy side of TV media, have made
announcements they are prepared to transact on multiple rating currencies this upfront, which will certainly be an enormous step if it happens. But someone raised two very simple questions to me
recently relative to the currency issue that I haven’t seen addressed in recent news stories or on the conference stages.
What do we do when the currencies don’t agree with each
other? For example, one of the currencies could say that a show delivers 20% more viewers under 40 years old than another measurement service. The second question: Who gets to pick which one is used?
Is it the seller, who’s likely to pick the one with the higher number and get paid 20% for a young demographic sale? Or the buyer, who is likely to want the one with the lower number, and pay
20% less on the buy?
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Think this won’t happen? Of course it will. Just go back and look how things worked decades ago, when Arbitron and Nielsen battled in local markets with competing TV
ratings (and radio too, by the way). It was an enormous issue that wasn’t resolved until Arbitron finally withdrew from the TV ratings market (and was eventually bought by Nielsen).
For
sure, we’re going to hear a lot about competing data collection methodologies, measurement sample sizes, sample biases, balancing models, statistical smoothing, etc. That will be fun. But that
won’t answer the question of what happens when real money is at stake. I can’t imagine that the advertisers -- the ones ultimately funding the market -- are going to eagerly step up and
pay a bunch more money for a spot based on one rating if they have a legitimate basis to choose a competing rating with a lower number and a lower price for the media.
What do you think?