• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 6, 2007

After two years of anticipation, Nielsen Media Research released the first official TV ratings for New Orleans to TV outlets in the market on Thursday, but gave Madison Avenue yet another surprise, informing ad agencies and advertisers that they'd have to wait another two weeks before they could also have a peek at the audience estimates. The data, the first ratings to be issued by Nielsen for New Orleans since the market was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, is also the first to come from electronic measurement, and it was that double whammy of circumstances that led Nielsen executives to make the decision to delay the release to the ad industry in order to give stations and cable operators time to evaluate the numbers before being used in TV advertising deals.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, whose effects displaced a significant portion of the market's population and forced Nielsen to indefinitely suspend ratings, New Orleans' TV audience estimates were derived from diaries. Effective Thursday, household ratings data - including overnight ratings - will be coming from Nielsen's household meters, and persons data will come from periodic diary measurement such as those being conducted during the July sweeps.

While that methodological change alone could have had an impact on audience shares for programs, stations, systems and networks in the market, it will also be the first time local and national advertisers will get to see the impact the population shifts have had.

Those shifts were so profound, that in the wake of Katrina, Nielsen downgraded New Orleans from the nation's 43rd largest media market to its 54th.

"We are so anxious to be able to get a reading on the ratings right now to see how they compare to the pre-K numbers," Jacqueline Engert, media buying supervisor at New Orleans-based Peter A. Mayer Advertising, one of the largest agencies operating in the Big Easy, said Thursday after being informed of the two-week delay. "Up until now, all we've had to rely on have been historical ratings and we've had to base our projections on population estimates. It will be nice and refreshing to have actual numbers to back up our negotiations with stations."

Engert said the lack of hard numbers has required a leap of faith for making advertising buys in the market, and that agencies have been unable to conduct post-buy analyses on the audience stations and cable operators delivered their clients.

Engert said media buyers do not expect the relative shares of TV outlets to have changed all that much in the market, and based that assumption on the pattern of radio audience ratings for New Orleans that have been released by Arbitron, and from scuttlebutt emanating from telecasters who've seen the new Nielsen TV ratings.

"No one has actually shared any data with us, because they are not allowed to, but the rumors have been that things are pretty much about the same," Engert said, adding, "WWL has been the market leader forever. So I doubt seriously that they're going to topple any place but to No. 1. Given the precedent that radio had, I really don't think there's going to be any monumental shifts with television."

By WWL, Engert was referring to the CBS affiliate that has dominated the market for years. Prior to Katrina, WWL-TV ranked a strong No. 1, followed by NBC affiliate WDSU-TV, Fox affiliate WVUE-TV and ABC affiliate WGNO.

"I am not being kept awake at night," said Bud Brown, president and general manager of WWL. While he declined to disclose anything specific about the new Nielsen ratings, he said that the resumption of audience data should be a boon for the market, assuming telecasters deem them to be accurate and stable, because it should quell any concerns big advertisers have had about their audience delivery in New Orleans.

In fact, there have been a number of technical problems and delays that led up to Thursday's release by Nielsen. In May, Nielsen's engineers identified a disproportionate share of a phenomenon known as "blue screen tuning" occurring in New Orleans. Blue screen tuning is a situation that occurs when a TV is left on after a connected device, such as a video game or DVD player, is turned off. When Nielsen detects such tuning without viewing, it omits data from that household from its ratings and they are not factored into its estimates for households using television (HUT) in the market, or nationwide.

Nielsen subsequently said it resolved software and hardware problems that contributed to the blue screen tuning phenomenon and announced plans to begin releasing ratings for New Orleans this month, effective with the start of the July sweeps, but the delay for media buyers was a new, surprising twist.

At least one major media shop, Interpublic's Initiative North America unit, has filed a formal complaint with Nielsen over the plan, and some other big TV buyers believe it simply reinforces perceptions that Nielsen is in the back pocket of telecasters, who are the primary source of Nielsen's TV ratings revenues.

"There are a number of scenarios that can come out of this," said Aaron Cohen, executive vice president-director of broadcasting at Horizon Media. "If the numbers are bad, or worse than they were before Katrina, it gives the stations a couple of weeks to formulate a response and adopt a position." If the new Nielsen ratings appear to be good from the TV industry's point of view, Cohen said they will quietly seep back into TV advertising negotiations.

"The third scenario is if the numbers are really screwy and the stations complain to Nielsen and Nielsen holds them back. Then everyone will say the stations were unhappy with the outcome and put pressure on Nielsen. It's kind of like pick your poison on what the outcome will be. You can only hope that things go forward without any bumps in the road and Nielsen won't have to reprocess anything."