• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 7, 2006

The battle over Nielsen's new commercial minute ratings heated up late last week as the cable industry officially weighed in on Nielsen's plans to begin providing the new ratings this fall. Following weeks of discussion among cable research chiefs, the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau issued a response to the Nielsen plan, raising a number of key concerns, including the fact that the plan relies on data derived from Nielsen's Monitor-Plus commercial tracking system, which has not been audited or accredited for use in a TV ratings service.

The cable industry objection follows similar concerns from some major advertising agencies, and comes as both buyers and sellers of TV advertising time are organizing a new summit to zero-base the approach and ensure that the new ratings meet industry standards for ratings currency. The summit, which is being organized by NBC research chief Alan Wurtzel and Mediaedge:cia chief investment officer Rino Scanzoni is expected to take place by early September, before the start of the new TV season (MediaDailynews Aug. 4).

Executives involved in the planning emphasized the goal of the meeting is not to derail the new commercial minutes rating plan, but to ensure that Nielsen is executing it properly and is using the best data and processes. A chief concern in that is the use of Monitor-Plus data for identifying when commercials run in TV programs. The Monitor-Plus data is not considered as rigorous as the TV ratings data the TV and ad industries rely on for guaranteeing advertising deals, and is known to have some flaws. Among them is the fact that Monitor-Plus does not currently measure all cable networks and it also is not currently capable of discerning between national and local cable TV ad units.

Among the options being considered by the summits organizers is calling upon Nielsen to make changes to the Monitor-Plus system, or even using an alternative service such as TNS Media Intelligence to identify TV commercial minutes.

Cable networks were initially caught off guard by the broadcast networks' announcement in mid-June that they had struck an agreement with Nielsen to begin reporting average commercial minutes data beginning this fall and they have been scrambling for a position ever since.

The cable industry outlined its response to Nielsen in a three-page letter sent by Vice President-Research Ira Sussman.

Since the mid-June announcement, Nielsen has maintained a position that it is not the arbiter of how commercial minute ratings should be processed or used in the marketplace, but would simply provide the data its clients asked for.