• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 19, 2006

In an effort to jumpstart his fledgling TV ratings service, Florida real estate tycoon Frank Maggio Wednesday will unveil a plan to bring the cable TV industry in as a partner. The plan, which will be detailed as part of a presentation Maggio is scheduled to make at an Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York, will include an offer to divest the profits of the ratings service, erinMedia, to cable operators who come on board in the next six months to share data from their digital set-top systems.

Maggio is expected to announce the hiring of a high-profile executive well-known on Madison Avenue to lead the initiative, and also is expected to name a cable industry insider to help make the pitch.

The plan is the latest step in Maggio's long-running campaign to launch a new TV ratings service to compete with Nielsen. Maggio said he is taking the new tack because it now looks like he has little or no shot at making and offer to acquire Nielsen - at least not for the next 18-months due to a "no-shop" clause that was an element of the sale of Nielsen parent VNU to a group of private equity firms. Maggio had been working through what he described as "backchannels" to see if he could acquire Nielsen and certain other VNU assets prior to the VNU sale, and had hoped to strike a deal following its sale to the private equity consortium. As a result of the no-chop clause, Maggio says he is redoubling his efforts to garner cable industry support for erinMedia by making cable operators stakeholders in the service.

"We will handle this through private placements, so that by the end of this year, 50 percent of erinMedia's ownership will be comprised of cable operators," says Maggio.

The plan is different than rival TNS, which has begun working with cable operators to manage and model their set-top data into useable TV ratings, and to potentially "commercialize" them to the TV advertising marketplace. TNS' approach is to act as a third-party processor of the data, which would be owned and controlled by individual operators. Nielsen also has been trying to strike deals to gain access to digital set-top data as part of its multi-pronged approach to measuring "video" across all its platforms.

Maggio also has a multi-pronged approach and this week will begin detailing plans to begin measuring audiences of broadband video streaming content, and to integrate those estimates into "fused" online and TV ratings (see related story in today's MediaDailyNews. Maggio, who filed an federal antitrust suit against Nielsen last year, alleging that its anticompetitive business practices prevent new players form entering the market, says he expect that suite to be completed soon, and that it is his goal to have the court order Nielsen broken up into separate companies offering audience measurement for discrete TV platforms: over-the-air broadcast, cable, satellite and online.