• by Wayne Friedman , August 7, 2007

MTV will look to California when trying to determine what's on the minds of consumers when watching commercials.

In its deal with TNS Media Research, which was made in February of this year, MTV will get second-by-second data to analyze consumers' habits. MTV, through TNS, will be getting valuable set-top box data from the 300,000-digital-household cable system in the Los Angeles market of Charter Communications.

Of major concern to MTV is in revamping its commercial pods.

Recent commercial ratings research shows that its networks--and other younger-skewing cable nets--have the worst retention of viewers, who drift from program content to commercials.

The MTV Network has been shown to lose anywhere from 12% to 15% of their viewers.

As a result, Philippe Dauman, president and CEO of Viacom Inc., recently told Wall Street analysts that in the coming months, MTV will be looking to trim and reconfigure MTV commercials.

For the start of the fall season, MTV got a reprieve from advertisers. Unlike virtually all other traditional TV media platforms, MTV will be able to guarantee its ad deals based on the now old metric of program ratings, an advantage to MTV.

But starting in 2008, MTV will guarantee its advertising deals made on commercial ratings plus three days of DVR playback, the so-called C3 promise--just like everyone else.

TNS Media Research has deals with several cable and satellite companies, including the same 300,000 Charter system in California and 250,000 national DirecTV households.