Executive Session with Steve Hasker

Nielsen's Local Ratings To Get Set-Top Boost

Steve Hasker, Nielsen's president of media product leadership, talks about the ongoing effort to improve the "fidelity" and "consistency" of the ratings most stations use to sell advertising through a number of changes, including incorporating set-top box data. He also says Nielsen intends to stay above the fray over using live-only or live-plus-same-day ratings as the best measure of local broadcasting — that's better left to the buyers and sellers of advertising.
TVNewsCheck,

Nielsen is not promising to do away with the often-maligned diaries that it uses to count viewers and provide demographics information about viewers of TV stations outside the top 25 markets. But it hopes to make them better by incorporating set-top box data from Charter and DirecTV.

In this interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell, Steve Hasker, Nielsen's president of media product leadership, talks about the ongoing effort to improve the "fidelity" and "consistency" of the ratings most stations use to sell advertising and well as Nielsen intention to stay above the fray over the best measure of local broadcasting — live-only or live-plus-same-day ratings.

Story continues after the ad

An edited transcript:

What's the plan for improving ratings for TV stations?

What we have done is strike a deal with Charter and DirecTV to incorporate their set-top box data into our local television audience measurement ratings. We have done a proof of concept with one of those data sources in three markets — a set meter market, an LPM market and a diary market to prove to the industry and to our clients and ourselves that we can incorporate set-top box data with our own electronic measurements to significantly enhance the fidelity of the ratings, the granularity of the ratings and the consistency and quality of the ratings in those markets.

We have taken that out to our clients, shared it with anyone who is interested and incorporated their feedback. So that’s our plan. We are investing a lot of time and energy and resources in terms of manpower and finances in incorporating that set-top box data. But we won’t do anything without the support of the industry and the MRC [Media Rating Council.] So, far be it from me to declare the date on which this will happen and what it will look like because that would be dismissive of our most important constituents here.

Can you give me any kind of a time frame on when we will see something concrete?

I can’t give you a specific date other than that we will be looking to incorporate the set-top box data from those sources into our local ratings in a larger number of markets in 2012, taking it out to our clients, helping them understand how they can use it and gauging their feedback.

What is the prospect for getting away from the diaries for demos?

There are other options for the demos. The one that we tested in the proof of concept was using the people-meter data. We have also done some research into using mobile and electronic demographic information; and last, but not least, we have done some research in incorporating some of the other demographic sources that we have.

So there are real alternatives that we have tested that we are getting increasingly comfortable with. What we haven’t done is productionalized it yet and gotten that in front of our clients, which is why I am hesitant to promise anything.

So you have two parallel paths here. One is to enhance the data that we have today with the set-top box data. The other is to look for an alternative means for collecting basic demo data in markets outside the top 25.

Yes. That’s right.

Could you just elaborate a little bit on the mobile and electronic technology you’re looking at?

We have done quite a lot of work in this space. We have an on-[mobile] device metering capability. We have very, very significant online metering capabilities. In deploying both of those technologies, we have large and robust panels in place today. So we would envisage being able to use both those panels and supplement them when necessary.

At the TVB conference in September, you stated emphatically that you would not be creating C3 [commercial, live-plus-three-day] ratings for local. Why not?

I stated emphatically that we don’t have any plans to do so. The reason is pretty simple. Our clients are not asking us to do it, firstly. Secondly,  we currently don’t have the capabilities to get the local television commercials encoded.

Some in the room thought that the underlying message was that the media agencies ought to adopt live-plus-same-day because C3 was just never going to happen. Was that your intention?

No. I think the question was, which was a better approximation of C3? Was it live or live-plus-same-day? As we get more and more data on that question, we will be very transparent and show it to all players in the industry. Today, the data is not declarative either way. We will show some third-quarter data as soon as it’s ready and then we will update it a couple of times in the forth quarter to show people what the relationship is between live and live-plus-same-day and how that compares to C3.

But, according to the people I talked to, the takeaway was that you were trying to send a message that because C3 isn't happening media agencies should be looking at a live-plus-same day.

Continued on page 2…
Edit Article

Tags

Comments (0) -

Today's Top Stories

Classifieds

The Market

Symbol Last Change (%)
Nasdaq 2778.79 -34.90 (-1.24%)
NYSE 7427.74 -52.69 (-0.70%)
S&P 500 1295.22 -9.64 (-0.74%)
Updated 05/21 8:08ä ET Quotes delayed at least 20 mins.
Source: Financial Content

Ratings

Overnights, adults 18-49 for 5月 17, 2012
  • 1.
    3.0/9
  • 2.
    2.5/7
  • 3.
    2.4/7
  • 4.
    1.5/4
  • 5.
    1.1/3
  • 6.
    0.3/1
Source: Nielsen
Reviews
Opinions
Features
  • David Wiegand

    Fans of Sex and the City have finally gotten their wish: Their beloved sex-focused sitcom is back on the air ... sort of. The four women have become four men, of course, and the writing isn't as good. Oh, and the laugh track so annoying, it's offensive. And did I mention that the costumes would be considered fashionable if you were holding a yard sale? Men at Work on TBS is almost quaint, it's so old fashioned. If it had any meat on its bones, you'd be tempted to say it's the sadly ignoble epitome of TV's long-festering emasculated-men syndrome. But it's so much of a big, forgettable, innocuous shrug, it's not even worth any actual vitriol.

  • Mike Hale

    The USA Network's motto is "Characters Welcome." Apparently they're especially welcome if they resemble Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Already stocked with Odd Couple knockoffs in Psych and White Collar, USA adds to its inventory Common Law, another comic crime-fighting show about mismatched partners. But this latest entry exhibits very little of that kind of spark as it tries to wring laughs from the juxtaposition of counseling and police work. It looks too flat and schematically plotted to succeed as the type of lightweight summer fun we’ve come to expect from USA.

  • Joanne Ostrow

    Johnny Carson: Fantastic entertainer, miserable human being. That's the lasting message of Johnny Carson: King of Late Night, the new PBS American Masters film, a rich history of a rare product of television who dominated the small screen for decades. Unprecedented access to personal archives plus all existing episodes of The Tonight Show (1962-92), distinguishes this film by Peter Jones. Telling interviews with family and colleagues, including second wife Joanne Carson, former Tonight Show executive producer Peter Lassally and a number of biographers sharpen the picture. The clips are carefully selected to illustrate specific personality traits, the performance highlights are given context and meaning beyond funny lines and memorable moments.

  • Hank Stuever

    AMC's The Pitch is a sharply-made if slightly off-putting reality series that follows different advertising agencies each week as they compete for new accounts. The inspiration for the show — made clear by its own ad campaign — is to harness some of the verve generated by the network's acclaimed Mad Men. The Pitch has a way of making the ad world seem like a real downer — a repugnant exercise in egotism laced with depressing bouts of creative compromise.

  • Tim Goodman

    HBO's Veep stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as former Sen. Selina Meyer, who accepts the vice presidential duty and regrets it almost immediately: She has no real power and gets muscled by the Senate, Congress and the (so-far-unseen) president, who delegates all the truly crappy jobs to her. Louis-Dreyfus has found perhaps her best post-Seinfeld role and takes to it with such fervor — the constant swearing, the barely veiled desire to become president, the unhappy give-and-take with other politicians and a delightful disdain for average citizens — that you can't help but applaud what is clearly an Emmy-worthy effort. Her work alone makes Veep a gem, but there's even more to like.

This advertisement will close automatically in  second(s). You will see this ad no more than once a day. Skip ad