Commercial Minute Ratings
Two of the most important concerns that are connected to commercial minute ratings is whether it should include direct reponse advertising minutes or VCR audiences that record.
Nielsen executives met with a committee from the American Association of Advertising Agencies recently and said afterwards that they are probably going to include the direct response advertising minutes as part of their data, and also that while they are open toward VCR audiences not being part of the picture, they haven't made that decision yet.
Judy Vogel, director of communication insights at OMD and chair of the AAAA's media research committee, said, "Our point of view is that if we are moving to a new standard of commercial minute audiences, it would not be right to include activity where we don't what the viewing environment is. And until Nielsen can measure VCR playback, VCR data should not be included."
She added that it was the "biggest issue" for the ad agencies The broadcast agencies want the data to be left in, for the obvious reason that it increases the size of the audience count.
Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus commented on the differences between the two sides saying, "There seems to be strong agreement in the agency community for Nielsen to do away with VCR record, and there probably is equally strong feelings on the broadcast side to leave the data in."
He also said that it wasn't as simple as it sounds as Nielsen would have to change the way it has dealt with the VCR viewing measurement from when they first starting attempting to measure it. Loftus added that they have already provided means for clients to see the ratings data without the VCR measurements included.
This is obviously not dealing with the problem as just because they've offered data that isn't really able to be measured, doesn't mean that it's right to keep on doing it. This is a practice Nielsen needs to change.
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