• by Wayne Friedman , July 13, 2006

While many on Madison Avenue are hailing Nielsen's plan to provide TV commercial ratings beginning this fall as something of a Holy Grail, at least one influential media agency executive sees it as more of a tin cup. Steve Sternberg, executive vice president-audience analysis at Interpublic's Magna Global USA, says the commercial ratings system, which is based on minute-by-minute ratings, is already a misnomer.

Viewers only need to tune to a channel for just a few seconds for that channel to get credit for a minute, asserts Sternberg in a report released Wednesday to clients and members of the trade press. "It can therefore label you a viewer of ABC in a given minute, even though you were only tuned to that network for 10 seconds of the minute," he writes.

Sternberg believes Nielsen's threshold for defining a viewing session should be at least 30 seconds.

He goes on to say that minute-by-minute ratings are not enough. "To really get at true commercial audiences, Nielsen needs to build the ratings up from the second-by-second level," he suggests.

Sternberg says the new commercial ratings will only be averages per commercial. In reality, he says, different commercial pods, within a program, will have different ratings.

In fact, he suggests the new commercial ratings may be no better than the program average ratings historically used by Madison Avenue as the basis of their TV advertising buys, noting, "An average of all commercial minutes won't always be a closer representation of a specific commercial minute than the overall program rating would be."

For instance, for the January 31 episode of "American Idol," the first commercial pod scored a 85 index, or 15 percent below the show's average program rating. The second pod hit an index of 92, or 8 percent below the program rating. The third pod had an index of 96.

The fourth and fifth commercial pod of "Idol" actually over-indexed, which means it did better than the program rating, with indices of 101 and 107 respectively.

Another major problem - one that media agencies have complained about for a long time - is the inclusion of VCR recording data in Nielsen's national TV ratings. VCR recording, as measured by Nielsen, is treated as viewing even though many of the shows are never played back in VCR households.

Those numbers continue to be part of the minute-by-minute ratings offered by Nielsen, says Sternberg, pointing out that studies have indicated that at least a third of VCR recordings are not played back, and that at least two-thirds of playback involves fast-forwarding through commercials.

Concerning DVR viewing, Magna Global says moving toward real commercial measurement will mean much of the DVR discussion will go away.

Last week ABC said it would begin offering advertisers minute by minute, or commercial ratings guarantees, for the media buys advertisers make on the network as soon as they become available from Nielsen. Some other networks agree in principal that commercial ratings will figure prominently in the upfront buying marketplace next year.