• Business Week, Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:31 PM

Marketers fed up with not knowing whether consumers are watching their television commercials are turning to a new wave of ratings services that offer them some idea of whether anyone is actually receiving their carefully crafted and often very expensive messages. A handful of new services have emerged, such as MediaCheck in Tenafly, NJ, to monitor how audiences respond to ads, both on live TV and in programs taped on digital video recorders. Daily "ratings" of TV ads--tallies of how many people are watching or skipping--from MediaCheck enable advertisers to determine quickly whether spots should be yanked off the air or at least switched to other time slots. Such new tools could help marketers hold their advertising agencies more accountable than ever, as well as possibly wreak havoc on the process of buying and selling ad time.

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